Eric Weinstein – 78 The Intellectual Wild South (YouTube Content)

The Intellectual Wild South — Eric Weinstein | #78 [Audio]
Information
Host(s)	Joe Walker
Guest(s)	Eric Weinstein
Length	02:53:00
Release Date	30 January 2020
YouTube Date	15 August 2020
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The Intellectual Wild South was an interview with Eric Weinstein by Joe Walker on The Jolly Swagman podcast.

Description

Eric Weinstein is a mathematician and the Managing Director of Thiel Capital.

Transcript

00:00:00
Joe Walker: [upbeat music] You're listening to The Jolly Swagman podcast. Here's your host, Joe Walker. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, swagmen and swagettes, welcome back to the show. This is a very special episode with a very special guest. But before I introduce him, a couple of housekeeping items are in order. Now, about 50% of this audience is not from Australia. You're from the United States, you're from the United Kingdom, you're from Canada, you're from Germany, et cetera, and I expect many more non-Australian listeners will be joining us for this episode. So with all of you in mind, in particular, a couple of housekeeping items. Firstly, the Australian bushfires. Many of you will no doubt be aware of the unprecedentedly destructive and cathartic bushfires that have been ravaging my country over the past several months. It began in about November. In fact, my mum actually had to evacuate her home in November. We even had a, uh, spot fire begin in our backyard about 10 meters from where the gas tank is behind where my old bedroom is. And at the time, it was just bizarre to think of fires near where she lives on the coast, but that was really just the beginning. Since then, over 18 million hectares have burned, thousands of properties have been destroyed, over a billion animals have perished, and 32 people have lost their lives. It has been the worst bushfire season in memory, and summer is not even over. If you'd like to help out, what I'm going to do is leave a link to the list of charities, s- the safest and most effective charities r- as rated by the Good Cause Co on the episode page for this podcast episode. So if you'd like to give to any or all of those causes, um, they will be there in that list if that's something you would like to do. Secondly, The Jolly Swagman podcast. Many of you are probably wondering about the weird title of this show. Indeed, many of my regular listeners [chuckles] are probably wondering as well. So let me briefly tell you the story of the title of The Jolly Swagman podcast. So I picked it with my university mate, Angus Isles. We started the podcast together in 2017 as a passion project, uh, before Gus moved to New York in 2019 and left me with the podcast. I hate choosing names, and although I wasn't fully sold on The Jolly Swagman podcast, it was Gus's idea. I've now kept it, and it's stuck. Um, but what does it mean first? The word swagman originated in the 19th century in Australia to describe an itinerant laborer who traveled the bush looking for work and carried a bedroll or swag with him. The jolly swagman refers to a character in Banjo Paterson's ballad, Waltzing Matilda, which is kind of like Australia's unofficial national anthem, and celebrates Australian values of anti-authoritarianism. So I kept the name for two reasons. One, it feels better to me than some pretentious-sounding title like Conversations with Joe Walker, and two, I get a kick out of the juxtaposition between the goofiness of the name and the rather highbrow content. In fact, I love walking into an interview and having someone totally underestimate the situation. So that is the story as to the somewhat stupid title. Enough about me. Uh, over to the guest for this episode. Eric Weinstein is the managing director of Thiel Capital, billionaire Peter Thiel's personal investment firm, and holds a PhD in mathematical physics from Harvard University. You may already know Eric as a key member of the intellectual dark web, a phrase he coined which describes a movement led by public intellectuals and journalists who share a commitment to enlightenm- enlightenment values of truth, reason, and open inquiry. Eric embodies the very best of what The Jolly Swagman podcast tries to be, and so I thought it was important to have him on, but I wanted to have him on for two reasons in particular. First, to describe Eric as a merely heterodox thinker is in some sense wrong. It implies that he's reflexively anti the consensus when, as his friend and employer Peter Thiel wrote, "The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd, but to think for yourself." Rather than being a reflexive contrarian, Eric is one of the most relentlessly independent thinkers I've ever met. Sometimes that sees him on the side of the majority. At other times, it sees him in a very small minority indeed. But it's that independence of thought that I believe is intimately linked to Eric's originality. Economist Tyler Cowen said that Eric is one of the most generative people he knows, easily in the top five or higher yet. Eric is such a fertile mind for new ideas precisely because he's uncorrelated to everyone else's. As a consequence of this, and of his undeniable intellect, he's made original contributions in the fields of economics, mathematics, and physics. In physics, he made a dash for the Holy Grail itself. That is, he advanced his own unified theory of everything, which he calls geometric unity. The second reason I wanted to have Eric on the podcast is to do with his compassion and generosity. In observing Eric's public interactions, I've noticed in him a willingness to give others the benefit of the doubt, a commitment to the politics of common humanity, not the politics of common enemy, and a recognition that, in the words of Oscar Wilde, "Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future." In this respect, Eric is an important role model and a refreshing tonic in this moment of cancel culture, outrage, and polarization. In this conversation with Eric, we discuss everything from geometric unity to Jeffrey Epstein, to the great moderation, to the great stagnation, to standing up to the mob, to creating a safe space in Australia for the people Eric terms mutants This conversation takes us about 20 to 30 minutes to warm up, but if you listen through and if you can bear with us through the moments where we veer into the weeds, you will be richly rewarded. This exemplifies everything that is good about long-form podcasting, and it is a different and interesting, a curious, a compassionate, and a thrilling podcast conversation. Without much further ado, here is Eric Weinstein. [upbeat music] Shall we begin?

00:06:42
Eric Weinstein: It's your show, sir.

00:06:44
Joe Walker: Eric Weinstein, thank you so much for joining me.

00:06:48
Eric Weinstein: Joseph, it's great to be with you. We've been talking about this for a while, and you-

00:06:52
Joe Walker: We have indeed

00:06:52
Eric Weinstein: ...have been incredibly patient and persistent, so sorry, sorry to put you through that. It was not intentional.

00:06:57
Joe Walker: No problem at all, mate. I think I probably called and/or texted you at least once a week for the last eight months. Uh-

00:07:05
Eric Weinstein: Yes

00:07:06
Joe Walker: ...and there's a, [chuckles] there's a, there's a balance to be struck between being persistent and coming across as a needy freak, and I was worried that I was erring on the side of the needy freak. But you did tell me to annoy you to get this done, so I thought it'd be okay.

00:07:19
Eric Weinstein: I think I did. Yeah. It's, it's, it's 100% due to my executive functioning problems-

00:07:24
Joe Walker: [laughs]

00:07:24
Eric Weinstein: ...and not at all due to my interest level. My life has scaled up beyond-

00:07:29
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm

00:07:29
Eric Weinstein: ...my executive functioning recently, and I have to come up with a new system.

00:07:33
Joe Walker: Yeah. But look, it's, it's great to have you here, and I'm so looking forward to this conversation because I think you're someone who, y- you know, some people have very high IQ to the extent that IQ is a meaningful measure. Other people are very emotionally intelligent. But I think you're one of those individuals who combines very high IQ with high emotional intelligence. And I wanted to thank you for the public leadership you've been showing and the compassion that you've been introducing into debates, particularly compassion towards people who are on a different political team. Um, so I think it... you're a very important figure at the moment, and I think you've been a role model for so many people, so I'm glad we have this opportunity.

00:08:18
Eric Weinstein: I'm thrilled. Uh, that, that's a huge compliment. Thank you very much.

00:08:23
Joe Walker: Well, I mean it. And I thought we could begin with your background. Uh, I think many in my audience will know who you are, but some, some may not. And I might ask some questions that you haven't normally been asked, and then we'll go into politics, economics, physics, and then I have a whole list of random questions. So this is kinda gonna be a bit of a wild rollercoaster ride, but I think that's what makes, uh, long-form podcasting so enjoyable and, uh, interesting. So to begin with your background, last year I had your brother Brett on the podcast for a two-hour epic conversation on evolutionary biology. Um, so, so far I've continued my annual tradition of starting the podcast year with a Weinstein brother. Uh, and when I spoke to Brett, he spoke about your grandfather, Harry Rubin, who was a very formative figure in both of your lives. And Brett said something interesting, which was that each person in the family got something a little bit different from Harry Rubin or took a different interpretation of him. I wanted to ask you, what did you take from Harry?

00:09:30
Eric Weinstein: License.

00:09:33
Joe Walker: Elaborate.

00:09:34
Eric Weinstein: [chuckles] Well, um, Harry didn't seem to play by anybody else's known rules. Whatever he was doing was very unique. I didn't meet another person like him, uh, during his lifetime, and I, I don't think I have since. And I think that his... He simply took for himself the right to reinterpret the world as he saw it. And there's something that he said to me which I can't remember, but I've replaced by the phrase, "You owe the world your eyes." That is, whatever it is that you see is in some sense more important than almost anything else, because that perspective, even if it's not right, is the perspective that you've been handed. And so if there's any value in it, you're the only person who can convey it. And as, as a result, he would see the world afresh all the time and find things that nobody else had seen. And I think the main thing that I got from him was the license to use your own ability to perceive the world and not initially assume that you are obligated to try out what the perceptions of other peoples are between your own ears. Uh-

00:10:49
Joe Walker: Mm

00:10:50
Eric Weinstein: ...your, your private view of the world is intrinsically valuable.

00:10:56
Joe Walker: While we're speaking about Harry Rubin, what was the Plato Society?

00:11:00
Eric Weinstein: [chuckles] What was the Plato Society? The Plato Society was a group of, um, mature or senior learners attached to the University of California at Los Angeles, and Harry would torture us, uh, repeatedly with, "Well, today at the Plato Society we discussed this or discussed that." And so I don't know why you're asking about it, but the, the, the cruel joke is that no sooner did we, uh, lose Harry that my father, uh, actually joined the Plato Society and started doing the exact same thing.

00:11:33
Joe Walker: [laughs]

00:11:34
Eric Weinstein: So I assume that it is my fate to join the Plato Society as soon as my father, uh, shuffles off this mortal coil and torture my own son.

00:11:42
Joe Walker: Have you been to any Plato Society gatherings?

00:11:45
Eric Weinstein: God, no.

00:11:46
Joe Walker: Okay. [laughs] Okay.

00:11:48
Eric Weinstein: The important point about the Plato Society to Harry was that Harry, and he didn't say it this way, was attached to the concept of wisdom. But the way he would say it was, "It's important to know what it means to have lived a lifetime."

00:12:03
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

00:12:03
Eric Weinstein: And he was very convinced that old, older people were being discarded And younger people weren't using the knowledge that comes from having, let's say, having been around for 80 years. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that technology has made old people seem antiquated as opposed to old people seeming wise.

00:12:28
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

00:12:29
Eric Weinstein: So very often something, you know, let's say, um, the Andaman Islanders, you might not have seen a tsunami in your time, so it's important to pass things down the, you know, the generations of what to do in case the water starts to recede. You should run to higher land because the water may come rushing in suddenly.

00:12:50
Joe Walker: Hmm.

00:12:50
Eric Weinstein: That's a-- That's not affected by technology. Tsunamis have a very, you know, clear signature. And I think that very often the wisdom that older people have today can't be used directly. It has to be ported, that is adapted for the changes that have happened in our society.

00:13:08
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

00:13:09
Eric Weinstein: And then with that porting of the old knowledge, wisdom can continue to be passed down because the games, once abstracted, um, have the same characteristics. But I think Harry was very f-frightened that what we were doing was just discarding old knowledge because it didn't seem to be, uh, useful. For example, um, it used to be the case that repairing things, um, was very important. Waste not, want not. But, you know, in our modern era, manufacturing is such that it's often cheaper simply to replace an item than to fix it. So if you attempt to use the old advice, you might incur a huge expense either in time or, or, or treasure.

00:13:52
Joe Walker: Hmm.

00:13:52
Eric Weinstein: And trying to figure out what waste not, want not means in a modern context doesn't mean exactly what it meant during the Great Depression in the United States. So you can't use that knowledge directly, you have to use it abstractly. Harry's contribution was to try to get UCLA students in their early 20s or late teens into the Plato Society in order to do intergenerational knowledge transfer and learning.

00:14:20
Joe Walker: Right.

00:14:20
Eric Weinstein: And that's where the importance came to him.

00:14:24
Joe Walker: Skipping forward, you completed a PhD in mathematical physics at Harvard University, but I've heard you say that you were not a good math student at high school, and moreover, you were bad with symbols, you know, throughout your life. Can you square that circle for me?

00:14:43
Eric Weinstein: Sure. Um, it's easier to do it with music. We have no shortage of fantastic blind musicians or visually impaired musicians, whether Art Tatum or Ray Charles or Stevie Wonder, so we're used to the concept of, of blind or nearly blind musicians. On the other hand, um, in Western classical music, uh, we transmit knowledge through, uh, written music or sheet music, and that means that those musicians who are visually impaired can barely function inside of the requirements of the standard, uh, Western orchestral tradition. Doesn't mean they can't be musicians. Well, what if there's an analog for science? What if the idea is that when you pile up Greek letters and symbols, uh, in an equation and, and those symbols start dancing, um, you know, from one side of a division line to the other and inverting themselves and, and you're dropping minus signs. Uh, if that's your experience with, um, trying to keep symbols in order, you may feel very similar to the blind musician expected to play in a, uh, to play Beethoven in an orchestra. You can't read the sheet music. It doesn't mean you can't think, it doesn't mean you can't reason. It just means that the, the major mode of transmission may either be closed to you or nearly closed to you. So try to imagine the problem of a classical musician who's visually impaired, uh, being handed new sheet music and being expected to perform on the weekend. Um, you're gonna have to do something different. Maybe you're gonna have to invite... in-invent, um, braille sheet music. Maybe you're going to have to work on a prodigious memory so that you can remember the standard repertoire without reference to sheet music. Whatever it is that you're going to do, you're going to have to engineer a different approach to the underlying content, and I think that's what's going on is, is that, um, we don't have an analog of, of, uh, of a folk music that doesn't require sheet music. M-music in most of the world has nothing to do with a written tradition. It really has to do with the peculiarities of Western harmony that you have to keep, uh, notes, um, straight and, uh, with, with this level of, uh, of documented precision. So in general, somebody who's blind will-- might have a harder time with Western music than they would anywhere else. Well, there's no, there's no comparable tradition of symbol blind physics or symbol blind mathematics.

00:17:32
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm. You worked in finance for many years, academia into finance. Can you explain that?

00:17:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I, I blame Adil Abdulali. Uh, he ca-

00:17:47
Joe Walker: Yes. This, uh, the... You co-authored a paper with this guy.

00:17:50
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:17:51
Joe Walker: Yeah.

00:17:51
Eric Weinstein: He called me up one day and he said that he had a problem with mortgage-backed securities that needed to be addressed, and-

00:17:57
Joe Walker: What year was this?

00:17:59
Eric Weinstein: Oh, this must've been 2000, 2001.

00:18:02
Joe Walker: Yeah.

00:18:04
Eric Weinstein: And, um, we were on the phone with, like, four or five guys, and w-we just started tr- uh, riffing back and forth. And by the end of the phone call, everybody else had dropped off the, the, the conference and Adil and I were left with, uh, a solution as to how one might go about approaching the pricing of mortgage-backed securities, which had been resistant to some sort of, uh, algorithmic approach. And so we, we sort of took a quantum analogy that the idea is that price discovery was a little bit like making a, uh, an observation in quantum mechanics, that you had a probability distribution that would then collapse to a particular price. And so what we did is that we replaced prices by, um, probability lumps and then tracked the lumps, if you will. And, um, what happened after that was that I learned how different, uh, this area of finance was because people were immediately eager to hear more. They didn't care about what our credentials were. They didn't care about, you know, whether we'd come through appropriate channels. Um, there were immediate invitations to speak. And this is e- entirely out of keeping with what was happening elsewhere in, in technical subjects, where fields were very mature and, and older people were jealously guarding all of the gates, uh, that were being kept, um, for fear that, uh, lots of new entrants would dilute them, in my opinion. So it was, it was pretty heady because I'd never had-- Like, in general, my, my experience in research before that was the more interesting the work you were considering, the more resistance there was to it. And in this case, it went the way that I would have expected, which is if you were saying something interesting, people would, would immediately wanna know more about it. So this was like a f- a field that was oddly, um, functioning somewhat better, at least at a research level, than mathematics, physics, biology, what have you.

00:20:26
Joe Walker: Around 2001, you came to be concerned about mortgage-backed securities. You thought they carried-

00:20:32
Eric Weinstein: That was the beginning of it.

00:20:33
Joe Walker: That was the beginning, yeah. You ca- y- you thought they carried more risk than the mainstream realized. What, what was your concern specifically?

00:20:44
Eric Weinstein: Well, I guess what my, my initial concern was that because these, uh, instruments lacked a good pricing theory-

00:20:55
Joe Walker: Yeah

00:20:56
Eric Weinstein: ... they would be perversely valued for their difficulty to price. In other words, the less of a theory there was, the more you could make up a story-

00:21:06
Joe Walker: Uh-huh

00:21:06
Eric Weinstein: ... as to what their value was. And I thought that was probably the unifying danger that, for example, if you knew that your field judged your performance not by how much money you made, but by how much money per unit of risk you took, but since risk can't be quantified, it would, for example, substitute volatility for risk. So that might be called a Sharpe ratio or an information ratio or some other kind of ratio. Then what you could do is you could mark your securities slightly lower when they were high, wh- when, when you thought the pricing was high, and slightly higher when you thought the pricing was low in order to smooth your return. So you might not be able to actually, um, lie too much about how these things were worth, but you might be able to lie a great deal about how much volatility there was, and then you could show an inflated number for your Sharpe ratio, which measures return per unit of volatility as a proxy for, uh, return per unit of risk. And so they were very amenable back then to storytelling. See, the human animal always wants to get around something like, um, objective measurement, because if you can get around objective measurement, you can tell a story, and if the story you tell is told to somebody who knows less than you do, um, you can use that as the basis, uh, to transfer money from that person to you. So I thought that was terrifying because mortgages were a rather large part of the economy.

00:22:48
Joe Walker: Hmm. What I'm trying to do is work out whether you kind of qualify to be in that basket of people who predicted the financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession. But, but I feel like-

00:23:02
Eric Weinstein: I'm not really interested in that.

00:23:04
Joe Walker: Sure, sure.

00:23:05
Eric Weinstein: I mean, what I'm-

00:23:05
Joe Walker: I just-- I, I wanted to know what-- Like, I feel like to fit in that basket, you would need to have an underlying theory of the housing bubble and the problems in subprime as well, not just the, the mispricing of the derivatives.

00:23:23
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I think if you really wanna talk about what is a prediction and who saw it coming, um... Like, if I were to tell you that I thought that the US was due for a crash-

00:23:38
Joe Walker: Yeah

00:23:38
Eric Weinstein: ... would that be predicting a crash? Or would I have to say, "I think that there's a crash coming between April 20th and 23rd," you know?

00:23:47
Joe Walker: Well, yeah, you, you need to give it some timing. But I mean, there's-- You're always gonna run into problems-

00:23:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, I'm just trying to get, I'm just trying to get at-

00:23:51
Joe Walker: ... of survivorship bias, aren't you?

00:23:52
Eric Weinstein: Exactly. So my-

00:23:54
Joe Walker: Yeah

00:23:54
Eric Weinstein: ... point is that that's not really interesting to me.

00:23:56
Joe Walker: Yeah.

00:23:57
Eric Weinstein: The key point is, well, what did we all do? Rather than trying to say... I mean, i- if the question is did I go around giving a lot of talks saying, "Hey, this is an alarming sector of the, of the economy to have this much, uh, play in," and do I think that bad actors are using it, and do I not believe in the great moderation? Yeah, that's certainly true.

00:24:20
Joe Walker: Mm.

00:24:20
Eric Weinstein: But If you really wanna talk about prediction, and you wanna talk about who was willing to put massive quantities of capital to work to show that th-they had a perfect understanding of when this was gonna collapse and why, I had nothing close to that.

00:24:36
Joe Walker: Mm.

00:24:38
Eric Weinstein: I didn't, I didn't even understand, um, all the ins and outs about, uh, mortgages. I mean, I was really looking at the fact that what I saw was bad actors flocking to a sector that, um, allowed them to use narrative in places-- in place of measurement, and I thought that was an alarming thing giving-- given that it was coupled to a story about, um, volatility control. It was somehow that the technocrats claimed that they had figured out how to banish volatility from the markets, which was, I mean, almost... It, it was almost inconceivable to me that grownups would tell a story like that. What's abnormal is to get large numbers of institutional players to pretend to believe in a threadbare narrative that no grownup should ever believe in, and then push that out to people who are far less expert than they are, and that's what happened around something like value at risk-

00:25:41
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm

00:25:42
Eric Weinstein: ... which is a particular measure that, uh, had a tremendous amount of weight put on it, and every expert in the field knew that it was not capable of bearing that weight. I mean, look, a lot of finance is theft.

00:25:59
Joe Walker: Explain that.

00:26:01
Eric Weinstein: You have experts who know where the bodies are buried dealing with people who-- you know, with whom they probably have fiduciary obligations. Uh, you know, th-there's this old joke about the, the broker, um, touring, uh, the harbor and showing his friend, uh, all of the yachts. "Well, this is this broker's yacht, and, and this is that broker's yacht." And then the person asks, "Well, where are the customers' yachts?" So there's a way in which, um, there's a level of predation in financial advising that's just should be thoroughly morally unacceptable, but is tolerated as a natural part of that industry.

00:26:41
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm. So Eric, by 2005, you'd stopped talking, at least publicly, about the problems with mortgage-backed securities. Um, one person told you to keep going and that you'd regret shutting up, and that was none other than your friend Nassim Taleb. Ultimately, mortgage-backed securities did prove to be a problem that would blow up the global financial system. What, what did you learn from that experience?

00:27:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, the toughest lesson is that in order to actually come out the other side of one of these trades, whether financial or intellectual, you have to learn to be hated. You have to learn to be ridiculed.

00:27:32
Joe Walker: Yeah.

00:27:33
Eric Weinstein: Right? It's like somebody's going to hand you a glowing hot lump of gold, and it's not just a question of do you possess the gold. The key question is will you be able to keep holding the gold till you can get it-

00:27:48
Joe Walker: Until the cool down

00:27:48
Eric Weinstein: ... to a safe place. Exactly right.

00:27:50
Joe Walker: That's a great metaphor.

00:27:50
Eric Weinstein: And so, you know, the problem here is, is that when you are in possession of an important and interesting truth, um, your community will put you through hell. Uh, "Ha! What a moron. You believe that? Well, how long have you been telling us that story? Oh, is the world gonna end, Chicken Little? Ha ha ha." Like, okay, how long can you take that? Now-

00:28:15
Joe Walker: Yeah

00:28:15
Eric Weinstein: ... Nassim could take that longer than other people, and that's part of why he has an audience and a following is, is that he's so disagreeable, and, and I mean that in the, uh, positive Big Five personality inventory sense of the word disagreeable, um, that he doesn't care. A million people could tell him he's an idiot, and he'd say, "You're all morons."

00:28:40
Joe Walker: Yeah.

00:28:40
Eric Weinstein: It's a very unusual personality trait.

00:28:43
Joe Walker: It is. On Nassim Taleb for a moment, what do you think his meta game is on Twitter? Obviously, he's incredibly rude and abrasive, but I feel like the obvious kind of boring interpretation is just to say, "Oh, Nassim's such a jerk. Gosh, for a guy who wrote a book called 'Antifragile,' he certainly is, is quite fragile himself," yada, yada, yada. But as a friend of his, maybe you have more insight into what he's playing at here. I-is there kind of s- uh, a meta game to his Twitter behavior?

00:29:19
Eric Weinstein: Oh, boy. Um, yes. You know, he-- There are, there are ways in which Donald Trump and Nassim Taleb are not well understood by people who dislike the modality by which they inter-- they, uh, interact with the universe. I mean, look-

00:29:33
Joe Walker: Yeah

00:29:34
Eric Weinstein: ... a s- typical point would be, like if you ask me about Knightian uncertainty, I think I rather gently tried to suggest that I didn't find it as meaningful as you probably find it. Nassim might say, "I'm sorry, w-what is non-Knightian uncertainty?"

00:29:49
Joe Walker: Mm.

00:29:50
Eric Weinstein: He'll just turn it back on you and make you regret it. Why is that? I don't know. I think it has to do with the fact that i-it's a question of frame rejection or, or, or game rejection. So you offer me a game, and I either play the game within the rules, I play the game by breaking the rules, or I throw the board up and say, "Why do you bring me this stupid game?"

00:30:13
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

00:30:13
Eric Weinstein: And very often, what Nassim is trying to say is, "You've come to me with a framework, and the framework that you came with is poisoned And I'm not going to step into your poisonous game so that you can, you know, play tic-tac-toe where the first four moves are yours, because that's just not interesting.

00:30:35
Joe Walker: Mm.

00:30:36
Eric Weinstein: So for example, I mean, this, this... A little bit of this happened on my podcast, uh, when I had Tyler Cowen as my guest, where our-- my point is, is that we're not talking about inflation in the right way. And Tyler says, "Okay, well, does that mean that our rate of inflation is too high or too low? Give me an answer." Well, okay, that presumes that even what you mean by inflation is the right sort of intellectual part of speech, if you will, and that it's a meaningful question. And trying to get somebody not to posit a framework is very tough, because people want an answer. "Well, if you have a better theory, tell me. Up or down?" And it, it's not easy to say, "I reject your game," politely. In fact, while Nassim's technique I don't think works because it's too abrasive, I don't think my technique works because it's too congenial.

00:31:31
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

00:31:32
Eric Weinstein: So nobody's figured out a way of saying, "I reject the game that you've just smuggled in in your question." And I think that's a lot of what's going on with Nassim.

00:31:42
Joe Walker: Eric, I wanna totally change gears here. Now, while you were in the world of finance in New York, you met Jeffrey Epstein, and I wanna talk about Jeffrey Epstein for a moment. So his death puzzled me and, and obviously many people because of the, the concatenation of improbabilities leading up to it. You know, two guards fell asleep. He was put in a cell without a cellmate, uh, when he was supposed to be just off suicide watch. Uh, the cameras malfunctioned. He had a, a, a hyoid fracture that was consistent with strangling more so than, uh, suicide by hanging. Um, all these things together made me update my probability more towards [chuckles] something other than suicide. Now, in seeking to make sense of Epstein's death, I've gravitated towards your Twitter comments and your public statements on the issue. Firstly, can, can you just tell us the story of the time you met Jeffrey Epstein? When was it? Where was it? Why were we, why were we meeting him? What happened? And what was your interpretation of him?

00:32:59
Eric Weinstein: Um, I'll sketch it. Uh, I met him, I think, in 2003, 2004. It was before his, uh, arrest and conviction in Florida.

00:33:12
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

00:33:13
Eric Weinstein: He was, uh... I met him on, I think, 71st Street, uh, in Manhattan, across from the Frick Museum, where he had a house. And it was a bizarre interaction. He was one of the strangest people I've ever met, and one of the most terrifying. He was largely interested in me, I think, having to do with my unorthodox views on science, but somewhat on finance. He did not-

00:33:51
Joe Walker: So did he summon you to his house?

00:33:54
Eric Weinstein: Um, my recollection was that he had somehow learned of me.

00:33:59
Joe Walker: Right.

00:34:00
Eric Weinstein: And that was a little bit strange. And then it turned out that sometime later, you know, I met other people that had been in his orbit. Um, John Brockman, I think I met in 2009. Lee Smolin maybe 2005 or something like this. So I met Jeff earlier, and my wife reminds me that I walked out of the meeting and called her immediately, and h- was very, very alarmed that I said that I, I had met somebody who appeared to be a construct, that I did not believe that any part of the Jeffrey Epstein story made sense. And this is, you know, this is a, something I, I try to teach people about w- how to consider... Given that conspiracies exist in the world, why is it that we don't have people who are responsible conspiracy theorists? My, my claim is, is that people tend to be pushed once they start considering whether something is really wrong to give their version of events. And my, my belief is that I don't have to explain... I don't owe you an o- an explanation of what Jeffrey Epstein was. I can tell you what he almost certainly was not.

00:35:34
Joe Walker: Mm.

00:35:35
Eric Weinstein: He portrayed himself as a currency trader with an extensive operation run out of, I think, Villard House in Manhattan. I do not believe that anyone has given a coherent picture of his trading prowess, who his counterparties were, where he did prime brokerage. Uh, I have heard no discussion of records recovered from Villard House. I don't believe that it is likely that his fortune, uh, came from trading as he was portraying. I don't believe that he was particularly interested in either trading or deeply in science, although he was very interested in collecting scientists, uh, for his, uh, f- for his intellectual life or social life or some purpose. It's not clear. Um- He-

00:36:32
Joe Walker: What was he like at a personal level? Was he charismatic?

00:36:36
Eric Weinstein: Beyond charismatic. Like a sociopath is charismatic.

00:36:40
Joe Walker: Right. Magnetic.

00:36:42
Eric Weinstein: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

00:36:44
Joe Walker: Right.

00:36:45
Eric Weinstein: And I, I've heard this disputed, um, but he was, he was... Well, y- you just, you'd never met anyone like this, um, most probably. Uh, very glib, very quick, very charming, at ease in any weird, um, back and forth. But like what we know now is that his assets appeared almost exclusively to be purposed towards outward facing activities like planes, show homes-

00:37:27
Joe Walker: Mm.

00:37:27
Eric Weinstein: ... um, you know, a private island. Uh, i- if you asked me what kind of fortune somebody would have to have to have all of these things, I would've put the fortune not at nine figures, which I think is where he's currently, like in the hundreds of millions, but I would say this would be an 11-figure fortune. So-

00:37:53
Joe Walker: Right

00:37:54
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, tens of billions of dollars, which I don't think he had. So it appears to me that he was in some sense constructed, uh, by whom I do not know. Um, but the whole story doesn't make any sense, and the media, which is, this is the fascinating part, does not appear to be interested in asking the most basic questions to try to make the story make sense.

00:38:24
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm. Why?

00:38:28
Eric Weinstein: Those questions are very simple. I don't know. Th- this is, this is exactly why conspiracy theorists go wrong. I mean, if you were a reporter, you would probably wanna ask, "Can we get a denial that Jeffrey Epstein was attached to any known intelligence community?" Right? Like this guy's trafficking in underage women, apparently. Wouldn't we wanna know if governments can easily say, "Look, this is, this is, this person was never an asset of, of ours or any known intelligence community." No one seems to be interested where's the last place that, uh, his partner, uh, Ghislaine Maxwell, had her passport recorded as crossing a border. No one appears to be interested in where the financial trading records are from Vollard House, because that would be almost impossible to fake. Like the, the complexity of faking, uh, a trading operation is astronomical in my, in my estimation.

00:39:27
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

00:39:27
Eric Weinstein: Uh, nobody wants to ask the question of whether the missing money from Robert Maxwell's fortune matches the amount of money that had turned up in Jeffrey Epstein's world. In other words, could we explain a missing fortune and a present fortune as being the same fortune moved from point A to point B? We don't know.

00:39:45
Joe Walker: Yeah.

00:39:45
Eric Weinstein: But nobody in my estimation... Uh, uh, you can ask whether he was murdered or whether he committed suicide or whether he was even dead. This is much less interesting to me. The really interesting question is why are there no reporters who appear to have normal press instincts? At least get a denial from, uh, British intelligence, American intelligence, Israeli intelligence, Saudi intelligence, what have you.

00:40:11
Joe Walker: Hmm. What's your subjective probability, if you had to attach a number to it, that the official story about Jeffrey Epstein is the true story?

00:40:21
Eric Weinstein: What's the official story?

00:40:23
Joe Walker: Uh, that he was a brilliant-

00:40:24
Eric Weinstein: That he was a-

00:40:25
Joe Walker: ... self-made Forex trader

00:40:26
Eric Weinstein: ... that he's a brilliant self-made Forex trader who, through a remarkable series of coincidences, committed suicide in a facility that has no record-

00:40:36
Joe Walker: Yeah

00:40:37
Eric Weinstein: ... of facil- uh, of, uh, of suicides. Um, like y- you're asking for the Drake equation. You can do-

00:40:44
Joe Walker: [laughs]

00:40:44
Eric Weinstein: You can do the math all by yourself. You seem like a smart guy.

00:40:47
Joe Walker: Okay. [laughs] Okay. All right. So-

00:40:49
Eric Weinstein: I mean, look, w- w- we're, we're adults.

00:40:52
Joe Walker: Yeah.

00:40:52
Eric Weinstein: Something... The princess doesn't feel a pea. The princess feels a zeppelin. Something-

00:40:59
Joe Walker: [laughs]

00:40:59
Eric Weinstein: ... is wildly off about this story.

00:41:02
Joe Walker: Yeah.

00:41:03
Eric Weinstein: And you can start to get me to believe the official story when you ask the question, uh... Y- s- you see, nobody wants to ask or answer the question, can we say with certainty that Jeffrey Epstein was not attached to the intelligence services of any major player?

00:41:23
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

00:41:24
Eric Weinstein: Can we say with certainty that we know where the trading records of Jeffrey Epstein were that established this fortune?

00:41:31
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

00:41:31
Eric Weinstein: And we know of other situations in which people have been constructed to appear other than they actually are, and my belief is, is that Jeffrey Epstein was probably... You know how Stephen Colbert was the name of an actor playing a character?

00:41:48
Joe Walker: Yes.

00:41:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, as we say in mathematics, without loss of generality, let's create two things called Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein the person and Jeffrey Epstein the character. So if the, if he's a real person, then the, then the character and the actor are the same thing.

00:42:05
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

00:42:06
Eric Weinstein: I don't think they're the same thing.

00:42:09
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

00:42:09
Eric Weinstein: I think he was hired by somebody to play the sapiosexual Hugh Hefner. For what purpose, we don't know. And my guess is... I, I would find it more likely that they hired the wrong guy with a pedophilia problem than that the intelligence communities of some of these, uh, countries I've, I've thrown out, um- chose to use pedophilia as a, an open part of their strategy. I mean, that's possible. But my belief is, is that we're looking at some unholy mess, and it's huge. We, we, we tripped on some very large piece of structure probably, and now the only thing that's holding [laughs] this back is, is that anybody who asks too many questions is of course a nutter, uh, and ready for it to be fitted with a tinfoil hat, which is the last defense of scoundrels when people merely ask obvious questions like, "Why aren't you doing your jobs as journalists?"

00:43:10
Joe Walker: Hmm.

00:43:12
Eric Weinstein: I, I have no time for, for this. It's a very silly game.

00:43:17
Joe Walker: Uh, uh, I'm, I'm with you on that. Eric, I want to ask you about geometric unity only because there, there are a couple of questions that I, I've always wanted to ask you about it, and it, it would be a shame to let the opportunity pass by. I feel like it puts you in an invidious position having to kind of explain the physics around your theory and contextualize it for people, but maybe we can do that briefly. Um, so let, let me start-

00:43:46
Eric Weinstein: By invidious do you mean tending to cause envy?

00:43:51
Joe Walker: No, no, just puts you in a, in a, uh-

00:43:53
Eric Weinstein: Unenviable

00:43:54
Joe Walker: ... in a difficult situation-

00:43:55
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Okay

00:43:56
Joe Walker: ... because, because it, you know, obviously there's, there's just so much there to, to explain. Um-

00:44:01
Eric Weinstein: Got it

00:44:02
Joe Walker: ... uh, and I don't wanna spend too much time on it, but let me start this way. In, in 2011, you met the mathematician and, and you know, your former, uh, grad school classmate, Marcus du Sautoy, in a bar in New York, and you explained to him that you thought you may have found a possible theory for, a theory of everything, so a, a theory that explains the, the deepest laws of the physical universe and that can unify quantum mechanics and general relativity. Um-

00:44:32
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, um, he was my, uh, co-postdoc at the Hebrew University rather than-

00:44:40
Joe Walker: Ah

00:44:40
Eric Weinstein: ... being really in graduate school together.

00:44:42
Joe Walker: Got it.

00:44:43
Eric Weinstein: And second of all-

00:44:43
Joe Walker: Thanks for correcting me

00:44:43
Eric Weinstein: ... the way you, you said that made it sound like I was hitting on him in a bar i-in New York.

00:44:48
Joe Walker: [laughs] Well, maybe. Maybe. Uh, don't, uh, don't shoot down the conspiracy.

00:44:55
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah, sure.

00:44:56
Joe Walker: Um, [laughs] can you give us a sneak peek into geometric unity? I want you to... You've never published a paper on it. You did do a series of lectures at Oxford University. I want you to unveil the theory right here, right now on this podcast. [laughs]

00:45:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, um, what are your most pressing questions about the universe?

00:45:18
Joe Walker: Well, [sighs] you, you probably have similar experiences. Sometimes, maybe this happens once every three or four months, when I'm at a street corner or I, I read a beautiful poem that really makes me think, or I'm just, you know, staring at a tree, I'm shaken out of the humdrum of daily life and just struck by the manifest absurdity of existence, and captured by the thought that this all feels so bizarre and arbitrary. What the fuck are we doing here? [laughs] And I, I do have deep yearnings to answer these questions of where do we come from, what is the, to use your language, the source code of the universe, how did the universe begin? But I just don't have the intellectual tools to even begin to answer those questions. So maybe, I don't know, maybe the first-- maybe, maybe the best way to start this part of the conversation is to define what a theory of everything is. Like, what, what is within the realm of answerable questions.

00:46:23
Eric Weinstein: Got it.

00:46:24
Joe Walker: Do you wanna talk a little bit, uh, about the, the taxonomy of theories of everything?

00:46:28
Eric Weinstein: Sure. Um, it's a little bit of a tricky topic. It is often claimed that every physicist has at least one pet theory of everything, and I view this as preposterous. In general, I don't even think most of us have considered what a theory of everything is if we are in the game of particle physics or gravitational physics or abstract mathematics. I've had to answer this for myself, and I'll give you my answer. A theory of everything, um, is a term of art that refers to a physical theory that is so complete that the questions that are left unanswered at the base level of reality no longer appear to be interesting mathematically. The two things a theory of everything are not going to do for you, in all likelihood, are, one, telling, tell you, uh, whether your grandmother will invite you over for tea i-in three and a half months. In other words, you can't compute the consequences of a theory of everything from the base level of knowledge. So it's, it's like y- knowing the rules of chess without necessarily knowing how to defeat Magnus Carlsen, right? Second of all, it's not necessarily going to tell you where the base level of reality came from. It's not going to answer the question, why is there something rather than nothing, straight out in all probability. But what it would do is say, "I don't think that we're likely to make mathematical progress on that fundamental first assumption." And I think that once you've, once you've sort of thrown those two things away, you start to realize that it's going to be some sort of description of objects and their rules that means that there's nothing below that level that appears to be mathematically amenable to future study. So I've likened theory, these theories to newspaper stories. Um, what do you wanna know? You wanna know where and when, who and what, and how and why. So where and when is almost exactly a description of space time.

00:48:54
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

00:48:54
Eric Weinstein: Okay? So that's the arena. So-

00:48:56
Joe Walker: Makes sense

00:48:57
Eric Weinstein: ... replace where and when by the arena where things happen. And then there's who and what, and that's usually, I think, going to be matter and force. That is what we would call, uh, fermions and bosons. So defi- divide all the stuff that is running around in this arena into two categories, uh, called fermions and bosons, and that's like the players and the equipment. And then I give a further analogy, which is the how and the why, which is sort of the rules. So for example, if you have two teams and a very high net and some kind of a ball, you might be playing volleyball, but you might also be playing this game which I love, although it injured my left ankle, called Sepak Takraw, uh, which is popular sort of down in your region, your Southeast Asia. Now, those are the rules. The equations might be the how, and then the why would be something called the Lagrangian, which gives birth to the equations. So now we've got, uh, in our newspaper story, the where and the when, which is the arena in which things happen; the who and the what, which is the equipment and the players, if you will. Um, those are the basic fields like electrons or quarks or neutrinos or photons, whatever. And then there's the how and the why, which are the equations and the master device that gives us the equations known as the Lagrangian. So that is sort of in a nutshell what theoretical physicists do with their time. They try to come up with an answer for these six things, um, and that's considered a physical theory, and then you explore the consequences, which may be very difficult to explore. But you hope that the consequences of those things, um, give you a theory that allows you to predict the future from a knowledge of the present.

00:50:59
Joe Walker: Do you remember when and where you designed Geometric Unity, your answer to this problem?

00:51:10
Eric Weinstein: Um-

00:51:11
Joe Walker: Where were you working on it?

00:51:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, I was at the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate when something-

00:51:17
Joe Walker: Yeah

00:51:17
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, momentous, uh, took over the world of differential geometry. Now, Penn was an unusual place to, in the ex- to the extent that it was not a top five mathematics department, but it was arguably number one, number two in a specific area called differential geometry. And the university, State University of New York at Stony Brook was also a powerhouse. So you had these sort of lesser ranked departments, still very solid departments, that were particularly good in the sub-area. And around that time, something came through, uh, our world, which was called, uh, the self-dual Yang-Mills equations. And rather than being what we would call second order equations, they were first order equations, and I thought that was very curious, um, to have a second order equations, uh, which is what, let's say, Maxwell's equations for light and electricity and magnetism are, reduced to first order equations, which made them look superficially, um, a lot like the Einstein field equations. Now, there's a f- another famous story about a guy named Dirac who took the square root of something called the Klein-Gordon equation, which was kind of a replacement for the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation, which was a second order equation, the Klein-Gordon equation. And Dirac, like a beast, just ripped, ripped the phone book in half and, and gave us a first order equation that was miraculous, I mean, arguably the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life. And, um, this was recapitulating that story of second order equations being reduced to first order equations. But nobody was viewing it the way I was at the time, um, that I could find. And so I started thinking about, uh, the idea that maybe this was not well understood by the professional community, that they had somehow not seen an opportunity to make the so-called Yang-Mills theory, which governs the weak, strong, and electromagnetic f- force group, look more like the Einstein equations for gravity, the, the one remaining force. So if we have, think about Gladys Knight & the Pips, Gladys Knight would be like, uh, general relativity, and the Pips would be the three, uh, versions of Yang-Mills theory, which is the upgrade of, of the Maxwell equations, uh, to cover, uh, s- the strong and weak forces additionally. How, how could you make those things all look more like each other? Um, what I saw was that this new set of innovations found by C. N. Yang, Jim Simons, Isidor Singer, Nigel Hitchin, Michael Atiyah, and Simon Donaldson, Karen Uhlenbeck, Clifford Taubes, and a bunch of others, um, they weren't taking these equations terribly seriously physically. They were coming out of physics, but they weren't coming out of fundamental physics. They were coming out of something called instanton correction theory or something like that. And I had the idea of, "Oh my gosh, maybe you guys are all goofing. Maybe you don't really s- realize that what you have." And that was itself a controversial Statement. And so I started playing around with these equations in the realm of something called spinors, and that caused a real problem in the Harvard department where I was, because it was believed that if the self-dual Yang-Mills equations had anything to do with spinors, then a guy named Nigel Hitchin would've, uh, come up with that. And I thought that was, like, terrible reasoning, but it was enough to cause a rift between me and the department that was rather severe. And in, in fact, in, uh, may- maybe that was around 1987. By the time 1994 rolled around, uh, two people named, uh, Ed Witten and Natty Seiberg had shown that, in fact, you could replace the self-dual Yang-Mills equations with-

00:55:32
Joe Walker: Mm

00:55:32
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, equations involving spinors. And at that point, I became absolutely sick of dealing with the math and physics communities because it w- I think it was fairly well known at Harvard that I had been pushing, uh, this exact line of attack, and it couldn't be acknowledged that the department was just wrong and that this kind of reasoning that if, if this had anything to do with spinors, a particular individual in England would've come up with it. Just, it's rubbish, rubbish reasoning.

00:56:02
Joe Walker: Did you know I had Leonard Susskind on the podcast in 2018?

00:56:06
Eric Weinstein: Congratulations. No.

00:56:08
Joe Walker: All right. Yeah. So, so for, for people wondering who Leonard is, he's considered to be one of the fathers of string theory. Um, and we spoke at Stanford University, and it was interesting, he-- My sense was that he was almost sheepish about the string theory community as it currently stands, and he said that he does not think that string theory holds the answers anymore. He thinks it's like a useful, uh, at most a useful kinda toolbox, but it can't, can't give us-- He doesn't, he doesn't think it's likely to give us the, the, uh, theory of everything that, that people f- many, many people in the physics community think that it could. Eric, my sense is that you-

00:56:48
Eric Weinstein: But what, what did you take away from that? I'm, I'm curious.

00:56:52
Joe Walker: Uh-

00:56:53
Eric Weinstein: No, you have to-

00:56:53
Joe Walker: From that part of the conversation with Leonard specifically?

00:56:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I mean, I, I actually would like to just explore something with, uh, there with you just briefly. You have to appreciate that the string community has a particular crime that it has to deal with, and that no one-

00:57:07
Joe Walker: Yeah

00:57:08
Eric Weinstein: ... feels comfortable leveling, uh, the charge. But I do, because I'm outside of it. The string community, when it became very animated around 1984 with something called the anomaly cancellation, which was an interesting development of, uh, Green and Schwarz, trumpeted by Witten for its importance, became murderous of other approaches to fundamental physics. And this is what we call, in the theory of evolution, interference competition. So, for example, when orcas decide that they're gonna kill a whale, very often what they do is interfere with that whale's ability to get to the surface, um, and they'll plug its blowhole or they'll invert it so that it can't breathe. You know, or you'll keep, uh, a rhino might keep a rival from going to a watering hole so that it, uh, dies of thirst. Now, that's what the th- the string community did to every other branch. They said, "Look, we're the only smart people. We've got this." And so my feeling is it-- Well, that's very interesting. So if you're now giving up on this, what are you going to do about all of the research programs that had to be terminated or all of the students who were pushed into this area? Or, I mean, I'm not gonna let this go silently. You've been incredibly badly behaved as a community, and w- the one thing we can all agree is that all you string theorists are brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. This is where all of the brainpower almost was, was funneling.

00:58:38
Joe Walker: Mm.

00:58:39
Eric Weinstein: Okay. But it's also time to pay the piper. If this is no longer what you believe is going to carry us forward, then you owe us a very clear statement, and if you don't, I don't know what your level of French is, but it sounds like, "We fucked up." You don't get to just say, "I, I no longer think this holds the answer. It's an interesting grab bag." Uh, you know, let's go back and read all those articles in which you said, "Everything that's worthwhile, this is the only game in town"-

00:59:09
Joe Walker: Yeah

00:59:09
Eric Weinstein: ... blah, blah, blah. This is a terribly behaved community that's absolutely brilliant, and so we have to give them their due. I, I can tell you all the great things that they actually accomplished, because they're very sheepish also about talking about what they actually did do-

00:59:25
Joe Walker: Yeah

00:59:26
Eric Weinstein: ... which was to ground something that I would call geometric quantum field theory. So it's not like they did nothing. But did they lie and cheat with respect to the press and with respect to their rivals about how likely they were to be in possession of the answer? Did they just become murderous? Absolutely. They murdered other approaches in this area. And so I think the next time you have a conversation with anybody in that community, consider asking the question, um, what responsibility do string theorists have when they claim to have once been overzealous and very optimistic? Because a lot of us said, "You're not, you're not even close to an answer. You're deluded." And I think that a lot of us are tired of being called cranks, um, and being pushed around by a bunch of aging baby boomers who don't seem to be able to deliver on the m- many promises they made through the press, through the funding agencies, that explained their right to take the resources of the community. So there is a little bit of just, [coughs] uh, incredulity that after all of this bullshit hype and PR, you're gonna walk away and say, "Well, I, I may have lost some of my initial, uh, exuberance."

01:00:45
Joe Walker: Mm.

01:00:45
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, no kidding

01:00:48
Joe Walker: Yeah. You, you asked me what did I make of the conversation with Leonard. My reaction was, "Wait, you're sheepish about string theory. Why haven't I heard about this fact?" You know, I was expecting to come and talk to one of the fathers of the theory and have him extol its, you know, explanatory power and the, the promise it had.

01:01:09
Eric Weinstein: Do you ever see a film called "Kill Bill"?

01:01:11
Joe Walker: But I thought, I thought that, that was newsworthy in itself, that, that [chuckles] he'd kind of like turned off it a little bit.

01:01:17
Eric Weinstein: So-

01:01:18
Joe Walker: I don't wanna overstate how much he's turned off it, but-

01:01:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, I understand that, but I think it would be really interesting-

01:01:23
Joe Walker: ... you can hear on the podcast

01:01:24
Eric Weinstein: ... to, uh, to have that discussion out. In the film "Kill Bill"-

01:01:28
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:01:28
Eric Weinstein: ... the character of The Bride, Beatrix Kiddo, uh, confronts Bill, and like, you know, Bill has absolutely tried to kill her, you know, caused, uh, her to lose her child, go into a coma. Every, every bad thing has happened to this woman, and she asks him about it, and his response is, "I overreacted." And her response is, "You overreact? Like, that's your explanation for all of that?" So that's what the funny part of, uh, confronting string theorists, uh, it- it's, it's like talking to Bill, and Bill says, "Yeah, I, I overreacted." It's like, well, we're not gonna leave it at that, because what you did was is that you took the most important intellectual community that academics has ever produced, and you threw our legacy, which belongs to everybody in this area, into the toilet to promote a theory that did not deserve the hype, the resources, and the, the reduction in vitality and diversity that were intellectually present in that field beforehand. So, I think it's really time for those of us who have been talking since 1984 about the excesses of that community to get a much clearer and better description of how badly this part of the community fucked up.

01:02:43
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm. Now, Eric, in 2013, Marcus du Sautoy invited you to present a series of lectures at Oxford University, uh, expounding your geometric unity, and there was backlash from the physics community who perceived you as some kind of upstart who'd bypassed the traditional processes of, you know, peer review and publication, and some of it was quite vitriolic. Do you remember how you responded to the backlash at the time, back in 2013? Were there some sleepless nights for you?

01:03:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, the-- there's a, a series of-- There's a lot conflated in your statements. Would you mind if I pulled it apart?

01:03:27
Joe Walker: Absolutely.

01:03:28
Eric Weinstein: All right.

01:03:29
Joe Walker: Go for it.

01:03:29
Eric Weinstein: The first thing is that there was an erroneous report that I had bypassed, uh, that I had not told the physicists that we were having a physics colloquium inside of the physics department. And-

01:03:44
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm

01:03:44
Eric Weinstein: ... the internet being what it is, um, that was, I think, leaped on, leapt on by Sean Carroll's wife, Jennifer Ouellette, "New Scientist," et cetera. Um, that was just untrue. I mean, we had publicized it, and people-- You know, I have pictures of the posters and things, and I'm not gonna get into a, a, an idiotic description, that they were just wrong. There were retractions. Um, the, the key issue, though, was that I had come from outside of that community, and, um, I was giving lectures that are not normally given. I mean, first of all, it's almost unheard of for a mathematician of any sort to be putting forth, um, physical theories. Uh, f- theoretical physics is an incredibly demanding area. Almost any attempt is going to fail for very deep reasons of what we might call no-go theorems. There are restrictions on what kind of particles can, uh, exist without getting, um, you know, bec- d- faster than light communication or retrocausal effects where, you know, things propagate backwards in time with respect to causality. Uh, there are all sorts of w- w... Phy- physics is stuck for very good reasons that the physicists understand very well, and almost nobody else does. And physics pedagogy is not particularly good, and so as a result, it's almost impossible to learn the field from outside of the field. The only group that I think has a- almost any hope, uh, I wouldn't even say chemists have the ability to do it. I would say that it's really only geometers, um, who, who can even get close, and in general, we can't get close enough. So, there are lots of reasons, and th- this is gonna make this somewhat unusual, because, um, to cut through the description of what this is about, it has to do with the fact that every physics department is besieged by cranks. If you're a top physics department, you have people-

01:06:03
Joe Walker: Hmm

01:06:04
Eric Weinstein: ... who find personal meaning in trying to solve the riddles of the universe, and very often they write into that department, sometimes in crayon, uh, you know-

01:06:13
Joe Walker: [chuckles]

01:06:14
Eric Weinstein: ... or with, like, crazy pictures, and what they try to do is to say, "I alone have figured out what you all have done wrong. The universe is actually a banana, and if you separate the peel from the white meat in the center, you see that this is force and matter and all this stuff." And every physicist is sick of this, and this, this often goes on something called the crank board. So, mathematicians used to have to deal with solutions to Fermat's Last Theorem or the Riemann hypothesis coming from crazy people. So we're, we're very used to the idea that people coming from outside don't get what the problems are, and they waste people's time by calling attention to themselves.

01:06:54
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

01:06:55
Eric Weinstein: This is in general why I have not interacted with the-- I, I, I have no need for this kind of fame within the physics world. I mean, you know, right now I have a popular podcast that barely deals with any of this. It, it, it will turn in those direction, but people are very interested in things that I have to say, so this is not a kind of fame that I'm particularly interested in. I wasn't then, I'm not now. There's a reason I'd never spoken to anybody about this much before I spoke to Marcus du Sautoy. Um, s- so whatever the story is, right, whether I'm-- I'm certainly an imposter, right? I'm very comfortable with the concept of an imposter not being a fraud. An imposter is somebody who believes that maybe, uh, they can pull something off that they shouldn't be able to do. Like just-

01:07:47
Joe Walker: Mm.

01:07:47
Eric Weinstein: ... the fact that you tell somebody, you know, were Watson and Crick imposters in the world of biochemistry when they went to Chargaff and asked about Chargaff's rules about the, uh, equimol, equimolar relation between the nucleotides? Yeah, they probably were. They didn't know biochemistry. They were just futzing around. Um, so I am coming from outside of the community, and the c- physics community has every right and every expectation from history in thinking that somebody like me will run into the same problems that have, have always happened, except there was this one weird exception where Einstein, uh, trained in physics, came out of a patent office, which was most unexpected. Uh, there are very few of those stories, but there are a few. There's an interesting story that nobody will talk about much, um, where a guy named Dan Quillen, I think, was one of the most important, uh, quantum field theorists, um, unexpectedly at, uh, in England, um, even though he was trained as a mathematician and in an area fairly far away from quantum field theory. There are these very strange things that happen. I think the Aronoff-Bohm effect was a very late discovery about the way in which electromagnetism interacts, um, with, uh, quantum theory. There are unexpected things that happen on very rare occasions, and whatever is going to happen, it's either gonna be an expected thing, where the theory is a bunch of nonsense, and note that in general, cranks don't talk like this. So I'm very well aware of the issues about who didn't follow the rules and what peer review is, but let's be honest, it's not like any of you guys are making real progress, and the real issue is how dare you have the audacity to try your hand at the most important game in the universe without going through standard channels. And my claim is, well, I've, I've watched how you guys manage your standard channels, and I would submit to you that what you did, as getting back to our previous discussion, is you allowed the string theory community to actually destroy the credibility of the field, decimate rival approaches, and, uh, I'm not dumb enough to fall for that one, and that's why I went into mathematics as a stalking horse with which to approach theoretical physics, so stay tuned.

01:10:11
Joe Walker: Hmm. That brings me to another question I had, and then we might move to another topic area. Are you aiming to release it during your lifetime? And if so, what criteria do you use to judge when you're ready to go public with geometric unity?

01:10:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, in part it has to do with my own cowardice, which is I don't think that it should-- Like we were just talking about Jeffrey Epstein. I pay a price for saying the Jeffrey Epstein story is wildly off. It's obviously wildly off to anybody who's thinking properly. But there is a client-side architecture that says anyone who suspects foul play or conspiracy is an, a tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracy theorist who's a nutter ready for the loony bin, which is a very convenient way to discourage people from asking whether something like COINTELPRO or some other well-known conspiracy might be active, right? Okay. That's going on in physics as well. Physics wants to make sure that if you don't play with the official community through the official channels, that your life is very difficult because they have the problem that I talked about earlier, which is too many cranks. I don't think I should have to put up with this. I'm not interested in it. Um, so I've been cowardly in my, uh, in my own estimation because I haven't wanted to tangle with this complex that is pre-fit for anyone who wishes to challenge the system deeply. But I actually wish to challenge the system deeply, and the fact that I gave those lectures in Oxford, I mean, if you look at the ultimate reaction, it wasn't that bad. It's not like I showed up and started-

01:12:02
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:12:02
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, ranting and raving. I mean, what I didn't do is I didn't give them a paper, and I was so upset by the way in which they reacted to what I had to say that I just decided to pull back because I didn't need the wear and tear on my life. But I'm interested, not only in my lifetime, in actually using my new podcast to prevent that kind of stranglehold that the official narrative has. I have the ability now to tell whatever narrative that I want, and we can have dueling narratives. But th- there is another aspect of this which I think is really important. Unlike cranks, I really respect these people that I, I, I disagree with so, so strongly. There is a, in particular, a guy named Edward Witten Who is the most unbelievable mind I've ever encountered face-to-face in my lifetime. And he is the principal reason that I think that physics became animated by string theory. And he's on the other side of this, this story. So in other words, in order to really make an impression on the community, I believe I will have to have an interaction with this person who I'm very critical of, but I also revere, right? And so there's a really deeply psychological, almost a mythological struggle of how deeply do you believe in what it is that you've done? And, you know, I go back to Einstein, who at some point, I think before he released, uh, special relativity, said, "I can't know whether the good Lord is playing a trick on me." And so having the courage of your convictions is, is the same issue that we were getting to with Nassim Taleb. How deeply do I believe in what it is that I'm doing? And I think I believe-- I mean, I think I've used the, the sort of six years or so since the Oxford lectures to gain some confidence that the official stories in the world are just wrong with much greater frequency than w- w- than we typically imagine, whether it's the nutrition pyramid, and we used to be pushed to eat carbs and eschew fats or, you know, whether we thought it was the great moderation, people had banished volatility, or whether we thought that there weren't governments using our free press against us as they were with COINTELPRO. There are all sorts of major adjustments to our, our knowledge of institutional reality, and they, they're-- that happen fairly frequently. And I think physics is headed for a very brutal rendezvous with reality as the baby boomers start to exit the scene and realize what they did to perhaps our most accomplished field.

01:14:45
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm. So Eric, sometime after those lectures in 2013, Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor, co-founder of PayPal, first outside investor in Facebook, poached you to be managing director of Thiel Capital, the, the job you hold today. I wanna talk about your work with Thiel Capital for a moment. It's funny, on Thursday, so a couple of days ago, I was speaking with a very famous Australian, uh, I, I won't say who, but I told him about our interview coming up and that you worked for Thiel, and he said, "Oh, Peter Thiel, he's a little bit evil, isn't he?" And it struck me that the public perception of Thiel is probably a universe apart from who he really is, and, you know, he's a friend of yours, so you can speak to this. I suppose the fact that he's now associated with his support for Donald Trump probably hasn't helped his cause. But I wanted to ask you, can you recall a- and share any specific moment or moments where you thought to yourself, "God, I'm, I'm lucky that I get to work with this guy"?

01:15:56
Eric Weinstein: I mean, constantly. I mean, uh, it's hard to pick them out. You, you see-

01:16:02
Joe Walker: Sure

01:16:02
Eric Weinstein: ... a lot of the people who claim to dislike and wish to distance-- you know, dislike Peter and wish to distance themselves from Peter in Silicon Valley also hang on his every word and consider themselves lucky to get an invite to, um, you know, dinner with him because-

01:16:18
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:16:18
Eric Weinstein: ... when he started supporting Trump, uh, I don't think this really made the press, um, [chuckles] a lot of people I knew in Silicon Valley said, "Well, if Peter's supporting Trump, what is it that I'm not getting about the situation?"

01:16:32
Joe Walker: Yeah, I thought that too.

01:16:33
Eric Weinstein: So Pet- Peter is, I think, pretty universally regarded as one of the smartest guys out there, um, but in this very contrarian way. And a good way of describing this, uh, the-- I have a friend named Dan Barquet who constantly uses the following metaphor. He says, "You see somebody looking at a window, but you don't know whether they're looking through the window or at the reflection in the glass." And if you ask me what Peter was doing in his support for Donald Trump, I don't wanna say too much because I know some things, but, um, almost no one before Peter went on my podcast understood that he's obsessed with violence reduction. He's not eager to explain that. And what happens when, um, you have a world that is faking a growth regime that is not sustainable, is that you're teetering on the brink of war. And-

01:17:33
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:17:34
Eric Weinstein: ... I believe that-

01:17:34
Joe Walker: 'Cause people are, people are fighting over the size of their slice of the pie.

01:17:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, and people are operating institutions that require a level of growth that can't-

01:17:45
Joe Walker: Got it

01:17:45
Eric Weinstein: ... be sustained. And so-

01:17:47
Joe Walker: We'll co- we will come to this idea separately

01:17:48
Eric Weinstein: ... so that Peter-- I think Peter's-- arguably one of his principal motivations in supporting Trump was that he believed, whether he's right or he's wrong is a different question, that Trump was a vote for violence reduction.

01:18:04
Joe Walker: Okay.

01:18:04
Eric Weinstein: And that the fact that we-- that the, the responsible and adult and well-behaved people in the room, which I don't think that Donald Trump is usually seen as being part of g- genteel society, had been telling a very genteel set of lies, um, from the American center left and center right. And I think Peter felt that those lies were incredibly dangerous, and Donald Trump-

01:18:31
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:18:31
Eric Weinstein: ... is a disruption of that narrative. Most people who have the opinion that, you know, Peter was terrible to support Donald Trump have no idea whatever his motivation was, and it's a little bit like watching somebody play something in the market. Um, you know, what, what if, for example, you bought an insurance contract, uh, to insure your house against fire? Would that be because you thought your house was about to burn down? No, it would be because you wanted to balance a portfolio of holding a house and the possibility of fire. So if you just look at one or two instruments, you can't even tell what-- You can't read minds and know what, what's in that person's mind. I think Peter thought that Trump, um, had certain characteristics. Now I, I vehemently oppose Trump, but it's not like I don't understand why somebody would be pro-Trump, somebody reasonable would be pro-Trump. You know, you, you're not offered a full... There's a, there's a concept, uh, in markets called a complete market, and in a complete market you can make any bet you want with surgical precision. When you have a binary like vote left or vote right, vote Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, you're-- you don't have a complete market. You have a binary and you have to, you have to, it's-- you have to make one of two bad decisions usually. So that's what he did and that's how he, he justified it.

01:19:53
Joe Walker: Hmm.

01:19:54
Eric Weinstein: Uh-

01:19:54
Joe Walker: I remember in, in 2016 watching the Republican primaries with mates and thinking that it was fantastic entertainment. Like we would just piss ourselves laughing at, at Donald Trump and how he treated the other candidates. And then when it, it was shaping up, it-- when it became more clear that he was likely to be the candidate, I started to become more concerned because I perceived intuitively only because I've met these personality types at various points in my life before, that he had some sort of antisocial personality disorder or narcissism or both, uh, most likely. And indeed I, I spoke with a guy called John Gartner on my podcast last year which, which turned out to be a controversial episode.

01:20:41
Eric Weinstein: John-

01:20:41
Joe Walker: Um, some of the audience-

01:20:42
Eric Weinstein: John who?

01:20:43
Joe Walker: John Gartner. Gartner.

01:20:44
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:20:44
Joe Walker: G-A-R-T-N-E-R. He's a cl- uh, clinical psychiatrist. He used to lecture at Johns Hopkins University. He's the president and founder of Duty to Warn, which has about 20,000 signatures of, uh, health professionals, uh, American health professionals saying that the president is mentally unfit to, to hold his office. And Gartner's diagnosis was that Trump is very clearly a malignant narcissist, which is a term coined by Erich Fromm and it was literally molded around Hitler, uh, and some of the wor- it describes some of the worst dictators in history. But a malignant narcissist, there's four planks to the diagnosis. There's narcissism but then there's also sadism, paranoia and antisocial personality disorder which people know more commonly as sociopathy or psychopathy. So it's literally the recipe for a monster. Um, [lips smack] and Trump seems to exhibit consistent evidence of some kind of personality disorder in that direction. My approach to his presidency was just to say, "I don't want someone like this with their hands anywhere near the nuclear codes." Um, the risks are just too high. They're, they're too unpredictable, uh, and they'll lash out to protect their ego. In some real sense they're not human. They don't have empathy. Um, other lives might not have, um, as much meaning for such a person as they would for someone without malignant narcissism. And you know, Peter, Peter's a, as you said, one of the smartest guys around. Surely he would've perceived that problem but obviously in his calculation it was outweighed by other considerations in favor of Trump. C-can you give me an insight there?

01:22:40
Eric Weinstein: Sure. I mean, let, let me-

01:22:42
Joe Walker: Like I'm sure-

01:22:42
Eric Weinstein: Let me start with you.

01:22:44
Joe Walker: You-

01:22:44
Eric Weinstein: You're describing-

01:22:46
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:22:46
Eric Weinstein: ... a misassessment of the situation in which you found humor in Donald Trump's ascendancy. I did not f-

01:22:52
Joe Walker: Uh, at first but then it quickly turned to horror.

01:22:54
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well I don't understand why you ever found that funny, right? So I-

01:22:59
Joe Walker: Well b-b it was f- it was funny in the context of surely this guy's not gonna win or come anywhere close to winning-

01:23:05
Eric Weinstein: That's what I'm trying to say

01:23:06
Joe Walker: ... the Republican candidacy.

01:23:07
Eric Weinstein: Which is I don't under-

01:23:08
Joe Walker: Yeah.

01:23:08
Eric Weinstein: So we had that happen in the States.

01:23:12
Joe Walker: Yeah.

01:23:12
Eric Weinstein: So the problem is what you've d- so you remember when before we were talking about strong frames?

01:23:18
Joe Walker: Yeah.

01:23:18
Eric Weinstein: You just gave me an incredibly strong frame.

01:23:21
Joe Walker: Sure.

01:23:21
Eric Weinstein: Which is that Donald Trump is a diagnosable, uh, malignant narcissist of the type that might be found in Hitler. So-

01:23:29
Joe Walker: Well-

01:23:29
Eric Weinstein: Wait, wait, wait

01:23:29
Joe Walker: ... I'm just, I'm just saying-

01:23:30
Eric Weinstein: Okay so I-

01:23:31
Joe Walker: I'm saying-

01:23:32
Eric Weinstein: I-

01:23:32
Joe Walker: ... I'm attaching a probability-

01:23:33
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:23:33
Joe Walker: ... to it. I'm not, I'm not diagnosing him.

01:23:34
Eric Weinstein: Okay well I called Donald Trump-

01:23:36
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:23:36
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, potentially an existential risk.

01:23:40
Joe Walker: Yeah.

01:23:40
Eric Weinstein: And I've said that the American physics community handing over [chuckles] the nuclear secrets to our military only to hand them to Donald Trump is a catastrophic failure. So ostensibly-

01:23:51
Joe Walker: Yes

01:23:51
Eric Weinstein: ... I should be with you.

01:23:54
Joe Walker: Right.

01:23:54
Eric Weinstein: But I'm not.

01:23:56
Joe Walker: Why?

01:23:57
Eric Weinstein: First of all because I never thought it was funny, and I saw the people who were thinking it was funny and I thought, "My God has history taught you nothing?"

01:24:07
Joe Walker: Yeah.

01:24:07
Eric Weinstein: Right? So this is a very Jewish perspective. It's like-

01:24:11
Joe Walker: But that's not my core contention.

01:24:12
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. But it was the beginning of-

01:24:13
Joe Walker: The, uh, the fact that I originally found it funny.

01:24:15
Eric Weinstein: Right. So I'm agreeing with you that this is an existential risk.

01:24:19
Joe Walker: Yeah.

01:24:19
Eric Weinstein: But I'm disagreeing with you on two earlier points.

01:24:22
Joe Walker: Okay.

01:24:22
Eric Weinstein: The first was this was never funny.

01:24:25
Joe Walker: Okay.

01:24:26
Eric Weinstein: It doesn't mean we can't tell jokes about it.

01:24:29
Joe Walker: Sure.

01:24:29
Eric Weinstein: But we joke about Hitler, right? And so-

01:24:32
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm

01:24:33
Eric Weinstein: ... um, this was always terrifying and I also think that the assessment of Donald Trump is probably incorrect as well. It's a normie style assessment. You know, I had Sam Harris on my program, he said it w- that Trump was the evil Chauncey Gardiner from "Being There". Um, we are not seeing, uh, Trump accurately and this is I think a terrible failure of, I don't know if you consider yourself on the left, I consider myself on the left-

01:25:05
Joe Walker: I broadly do

01:25:06
Eric Weinstein: Broadly do with, but it's, it's a little challenging these days if we have to admit, right? We are all suffering from a complete strange madness that nobody can quite explain, diagnose, or understand. And that madness allowed us to put up with, let's say, the weapons of mass destruction, uh, narrative about why the US needed to invade Iraq after, uh, we were apparently hit by Saudis, uh, and Egyptians based in Afghanistan. You know? I mean, that seemed like a very weird thing. Um, Hillary Clinton seemed like an absolutely abysmal, disingenuous candidate to me. And I don't think Hillary Clinton was an existential risk, but I think that the series that included Bill Clinton, uh, George W. Bush, Obama, and, by the way, I was quite enthusiastic about Obama, at least the first time. So that wasn't even a lesser of two evils. I, I misjudged the man. Um, that very often what we're reacting to is does somebody sound genteel? Do they sound within the bounds of normal professional dialogue? Donald Trump is outside, and I think that part of the problem that we have is that people who are outside of the boundaries, and he is very much outside of the boundaries of normal, are misunderstood by people inside of the boundaries of normal. So I do think that Donald Trump has some very antisocial tendencies, and I do think that he has some very caring tendencies. I think that he actually has a deep patriotism, and I think he also has a deep desire to exploit his situation. And I think he has a deep hatred for the press, and I think he has a deep need to be loved. And I do think that he has empathy, and I think he has lacks of empathy, and I think that he's very aggressive in business and to the point of being unethical. And I also think that he's taken great care of certain people in business to make sure that they're okay. I think that what you're looking at is a superposition of different personality traits of an incredible level of complexity, and I don't think I've flinched in any case from saying that I think he's a terrible choice to put in that seat. But what I've learned, and which I didn't understand before, is that if you assume that Donald Trump is an antisocial personality type of a malignant nature and very narcissistic and dangerous to put in charge of the nuclear codes, why is this not creating introspection on the American left? With all of the nonsense coming out of identity politics-

01:27:47
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:27:47
Eric Weinstein: ... with all of the crimes of a kleptocratic center that was in place for a very long period of time with widening inequality gaps, why are we not talking about the terrible cost in lives and treasure of the invasion of Iraq? Why is this not producing anything like introspection on the American left? If this is orange Hitler and there is no introspection on the American left, then let us agree that both of these groups are completely insane. And that's where I find myself, is, is that I can't look at the institutional class as being sane. It was very much like the Great Moderation, which they were just completely getting something wrong, and they were arrogant as could be in the wa- in the way that they were defending themselves. Same thing with string theory. We are in the middle of a giant bubble of nonsense that is 50 years in the making, in my estimation. And people like Nassim Taleb, who appear to be mad as a hatter, right? Those people are very often the only people from whom bits of truth can be gleaned. And I think it's an incredibly depressing diagnosis. But there you are. Do you trust your doctor? Do you trust your economists? Do you trust your politicians? Is your newspaper asking the right questions about Jeffrey Epstein? In no institutional corner can I find any group functioning what I-- in a way that I would consider normal from my childhood, uh, in the late '60s and early '70s.

01:29:15
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

01:29:17
Eric Weinstein: So I think that the idea is that cometh the hour, cometh the man. Donald Trump is the monkey wrench that many Americans-

01:29:24
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:29:24
Eric Weinstein: ... wanted to throw into the spokes of the machine that was whirring, uh, whirring along.

01:29:33
Joe Walker: Does Thiel agree with you that Donald Trump is an existential risk?

01:29:39
Eric Weinstein: I think you should have him on your program.

01:29:41
Joe Walker: Right. Okay. We'll save that for another time.

01:29:44
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:29:44
Joe Walker: I do wanna come back to Thiel Capital. I don't think anyone in any public interview I've seen you do has asked you about your work there, your daily work. Um, and I'm just fascinated to know, 'cause I'm very interested in, in tech and venture capital entrepreneurship. Do you make investment decisions as the managing director at Thiel Capital?

01:30:05
Eric Weinstein: Peter makes the decisions for Thiel Capital because it's, it-

01:30:09
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:30:09
Eric Weinstein: ... Thiel Capital is a family office.

01:30:12
Joe Walker: Yeah.

01:30:12
Eric Weinstein: And I'm not going to talk about-- I mean, just in terms of compliance, um-

01:30:18
Joe Walker: Of course

01:30:19
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm not going to talk about-

01:30:20
Joe Walker: Of course

01:30:20
Eric Weinstein: ... our operations or what Thiel Capital thinks about or how its internal workings, um... You know, it's sort of a name, rank, and serial number question.

01:30:30
Joe Walker: Uh-huh.

01:30:31
Eric Weinstein: But let's say this, uh, my duties, um, shift within Thiel Capital based on what Peter needs, what I think is interesting. And so I've, I've worked with the philanthropic arm. Um, I've been, uh, active in, you know, uh, discussion of markets and conditions. Uh, there's a public intellectualism that comes out of Thiel Capital. So all of these things are potentially, um, within, within the purview

01:31:10
Joe Walker: Have you learned any surprising heuristics for life or decision-making in business from Peter himself w- weren't front of mind to you or you weren't aware of before you began working at Thiel Capital?

01:31:23
Eric Weinstein: Well, absolutely. In fact, he's written a book, "Zero to One," which I would, uh, recommend.

01:31:28
Joe Walker: Yeah.

01:31:28
Eric Weinstein: He gives a lot of interviews.

01:31:29
Joe Walker: Well, I was gonna say, can, can we, can we just find the answers in "Zero to One" or is there, there anything else you can give us an insight into?

01:31:34
Eric Weinstein: Well, look, Peter has earned... P- people w- often want to talk to... I, I generally don't speak a lot about Peter, and I haven't really spoken much about my relationship with Peter outside of our interview. Um, I think people who are interested in Peter should glean a lot that he hired a guy who voted for Bernie, who called Donald Trump an existential risk. Um, and he has given me w- what academicians dream of, which is academic freedom. Now, that's predicated upon my trust and our friendship. Um, so I, I've, I've, uh... You know, it's a little bit like stage diving. You know, you, you jump off the stage and you see whether anyone will support you. Um-

01:32:32
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:32:32
Eric Weinstein: ... if you like the podcast, if you like my politics, if you like my reasoning, um, in w- some weird way you have Peter Thiel to thank for that because he believes in freedom for uncorrelated individuals, uh, who are trying to responsibly explore the frontier, and he's not very focused on whether you're left, right, center, black, blue, white, brown. Doesn't care. What he's interested in is-

01:32:58
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:32:58
Eric Weinstein: ... who's got good ideas. And most importantly, um, I'll share one little thing with you that I think is very in- telling. Peter at some point said to me with respect to philanthropy, "We shouldn't be doing the work that is good that others will recognize is good." I said, "Why?" He said, "Because somebody else will get pleasure from, from doing that work. We have to do the work that other people don't recognize needs to be done and will be misunderstood." And if I can give one example of that, I don't think that the responsible academic community understood that part of the impetus behind the Thiel Fellowship paying very talented people to drop out of college to explore other avenues had to do with the idea that we have a student debt crisis that is destroying families that cannot afford, uh, to go deeply into debt. And that was an act largely of caring and compassion and concern that is only now being understood. And I believe that the same thing is happening with other actions that Peter's taken. He may be right, he may be wrong, but if you actually find yourself in his inner circle, very often you find that the real reason that something is being undertaken is far more compassionate than he feels comfortable revealing. And I don't wanna undermine-

01:34:26
Joe Walker: Hmm

01:34:26
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, him because he might not even want people to know that he's trying to do good.

01:34:32
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm. Well, I think he's a very impressive guy.

01:34:36
Eric Weinstein: You're a brave man to say that.

01:34:37
Joe Walker: Eric, let's talk about Austra- [laughs] Eric, let's talk about Australia. If you remember, the first time you and I spoke was on the phone for about 45 minutes. You were in an airport, I was standing in the street outside my house, and it was the Sunday after the Australian federal election held on the 18th of May 2019, when the coalition government, Australia's center-right government, won a surprise election victory, and we spoke about that. I was feeling a little bit disappointed because I voted for and was barracking for the left-leaning party, the Australian Labor Party. And we had a conversation, and you said to me that you suspect Australia might be a model for other countries, including the United States, but that we in Australia needed to sort out our national identity. I wanna explore that with you a little bit, but let's start with the good bit first. What in your eyes makes Australia special, or what have you noticed about Australia that is worth emulating?

01:35:42
Eric Weinstein: It's an interesting question. I mean, I first became aware of Australians when I was a backpacker. Uh, they were the group that would most often, uh, not only drink me under the table, but make sure that I got home to my bed safely afterwards. Uh, extremely strong, hardy, uh, fun people who had a kind of rough ruggedness that was coupled to a kind of, uh, kind and compassionate core. Um, so it was very interesting personality traits. I hadn't experienced much, uh, uh, of Australians until I, until I was a backpa- backpacker. Um, I have since come to be focused on the Anglophone world based on the idea that we share, um, some traditions. Um, now American-- The US may not be part of the Commonwealth, but if you look at the major Anglophone countries, um, I think it's becoming interesting to divide us a little bit by, uh, northern Anglophone and southern Anglophone. So the UK, the US, and Canada-

01:36:49
Joe Walker: Hmm

01:36:49
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, in one system, and maybe Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa by some measure in another. I think that something very bad is happening in the US and the UK simultaneously, which, which showed up in part, um, with the 2016 election of Clinton versus Trump in the US, with Brexit in the UK And I think Australia has a really weirdly successful multicultural society in many ways that has outgrown an earlier version of the Australian identity. Now, if I think about the way in which we think about Australia, if we think about Australia at all, it's kind of upsetting to me, to be blunt. Um, you know, you'll hear the same cliches over and over again. Uh, throw another shrimp, shrimp on the barbie, you know, talking about Sheilas, and then, you know, even-- I'm talking here on the "Jolly Swagman" [chuckles] podcast. Sorry about that. You know, the-- maybe if, if you know, if you're really well-versed, you know something about Gallipoli, um, and Crocodile Dundee, the thunder from Down Under. I'm bored of all that stuff, and everybody's bored of it.

01:38:05
Joe Walker: Uh-huh.

01:38:05
Eric Weinstein: Um, something more interesting is happening in Australia. Something in the rivalry between Melbourne and, uh, and Sydney, um, is interesting to us. Something about the fact that a, a person like Julian Assange, uh, would come out of there, or that you've had two recent, uh, Fields Medalists in, in mathematics with their roots in Australia, one of, I suppose, Chinese or, uh, extraction, the other of South Asian extraction. Um, what's going on? Something interesting. Something about the fact that you guys are pretty far out of the game, that you're still distant by air travel, that you're closer to Asia. You're the custodians of an incredible natural endowment. I mean, the two branches of, uh, mammals that are truly ancient, monotremes, uh, and, uh, marsupials, um, you're the custodians of the, of those. In fact, my company, uh, for my podcast is named Shimmering Echidna, um, because of my obsession, uh, with, with the monotreme branch o-of the, of the mammalian clade. Now, my question is, okay, what if instead of being kind of slightly self-effacing and self-defeating, you guys realized that the powerhouses, that is the UK and the US, are stumbling? Time to lead. This is your moment. Don't look to us. Why don't you tell us rather than ask us? You know, that's, that's really sort of where my head is at. Why not build a great, um, university right now at a time when our universities are going crazy? You know, if, if we continue, uh, with our politically inept madness, what damage are we gonna do to scholarship at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Cambridge, et cetera? You know, the University of Chicago, by virtue of the fact that it doesn't feel very guilty because it's always been open to women, to Blacks, to, um, people who are trying to accelerate their education, they've been breaking the rules for so long that they don't feel a need to jump on this politically correct nonsense, uh, of self-flagellation. Well, what if Australia, which has never had much of an empire, said, "Okay, we've got, we've gotta deal with the issue of our own history with our, um, Aboriginal population and First Peoples," but, you know, other than that, we're the ones closest to Asia as Asia gets most-- gets to be more important. We've got an incredible population that is intellectually animated, somewhat uncorrelated. It-- Now is the time for uncorrelated Australia and New Zealand, and you guys are the big dogs. Like, there's barely anybody over there in New Zealand, you know? Maybe fewer people since they sent us the Flight of the Conchords. But, you know, what, what I would say is, um, I'm fascinated by how far away you guys are and how-

01:41:12
Joe Walker: Mm

01:41:13
Eric Weinstein: ... much of an opportunity you have if you'll just let go of the kind of, um... Well, we have the Wild West in the US, and we've no longer, we're no longer making Westerns the way we used to. But I think you guys are the Wild South, and I think that the Wild South can move from kind of a frontier mentality in terms of settlement, which might be fraught with some history because there were, there were people there before Europeans showed up [chuckles], um, to a, an intellectual Wild South. Like, what is it-

01:41:46
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm

01:41:47
Eric Weinstein: ... that you guys can afford to talk about in your multicultural new Australia, um, that doesn't devolve into an endless, uh, self-celebration or self-flagellation, but instead actually makes use of the fact that you're, you're handling, let's say, immigration differently, that you're aggressively integrating people and aggressively turning people away, you know? You're doing something different.

01:42:10
Joe Walker: Yeah. Let me give you a statistic, Eric. Uh, 30% of Australians were born overseas, and half have at least one parent born overseas, which is an incredible statistic, higher than in the United States, obviously. I think in the United States about 24% of Americans were born overseas. Uh, and I agree, we are, in my opinion, the most successful multicultural country in the world. Um, have you heard this phrase, the tyranny of distance?

01:42:41
Eric Weinstein: No.

01:42:44
Joe Walker: It was popularized, if not coined by-

01:42:48
Eric Weinstein: I shouldn't say I haven't heard it

01:42:49
Joe Walker: ... one of-

01:42:49
Eric Weinstein: I think I've heard it. It's not, it doesn't play in my mind-

01:42:51
Joe Walker: You may have. Yeah, yeah

01:42:52
Eric Weinstein: ... and I don't, I don't know what associations I should have with it.

01:42:55
Joe Walker: Yeah. So it's, it, it's from the title of one of Australia's most famous history books by one of Australia's most famous historians, Geoffrey Blainey. The book is called "The Tyranny of Distance", and it's about, about how distance from other parts of the world, but also distance within Australia, the continent itself, shaped Australian history, uh, identity, institutions, uh, and Australia's economy. The book was published in 1966, and it was a h- a publication hit. It's like a perennial coffee table book in Australian homes. But I think that has definitely sunk deep into the Australian Public consciousness, the, the notion of the tyranny of distance. We view ourselves as very much a safe, stable pocket, uh, far away from the ravages of war. Um, and our isolation has let us do some interesting things. For example, when Australia federated at the turn of the 20th century, the system we designed is often referred to as a Washminster system. It was like a Frankenstein combination of the Westminster system borrowed from the English tradition, and then many ideas stolen from America, uh, and, and, and the things you guys did. So we had this, this really innovative constitution, uh, for its time. [lip smack] We perceive ourselves as the lucky country, which is a, a moniker taken from a book of the same name by Donald Horne. Um, and originally it was intended as a pejorative. Uh, I think the line from his book was, "Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people." Um, you know, we had... We have amazing mineral wealth, um, which has enabled us to be enormously rich at various points in history. Australia was the richest country in the world in the 1890s. But since Horne's book was published, we've inverted it into a strange sort of compliment, and I think that inversion in itself says something about the Australian spirit of kind of laconic optimism. But my concern at the moment for my country is that that laconic optimism is now verging on complacency. We had a mining boom, thank you to China, which ended in the mid two thou- about 2014. Um, and then we built a bridge to future prosperity by dropping interest rates and blowing up another housing bubble, which tapered off between mid-2017 and mid-2019, but is now kind of rebounding again, our house prices. Um, and, and one of the memes about Australia's economy that you often hear is that our economy is essentially houses and holes. So, you know, inflating asset prices and then digging stuff out of the ground and shipping it overseas. We need to develop an Australian Silicon Valley and build an aggressive productivity agenda, which, because we are the lucky country, we haven't had evolutionary pressure on us to do those things for, for decades now, or otherwise we, we are going to be what I think Lee Kuan Yew called us. [chuckles] We could end up being the poor white trash of Asia. At the same time, we have, we have so many assets. We've spoken about the multiculturalism, about the Washminster system. I think something that really sets us apart from America is compulsory voting. It means that there's much less political polarization. Parties have to appeal to the center to win votes, not to their bases. I think that's a huge asset. I think our intellectual, our, our hu- our human capital, um, and our universities are great. But you know, Jon- Jonathan Haidt was here last year, he's been on my podcast, and he noticed the same trends in Australian elite universities as you guys are experiencing in your elite universities in America, and indeed around the, the rest of the Anglosphere. This veering towards political correctness, this rethinking of the university's telos or its purpose as being more about social justice than the pursuit of truth, um, that, that is certainly emerging as a problem in Australia as well. Um, so there's a lot there. What I think America can learn from Australia, just in terms of practical policies, is compulsory voting. Although, I mean, I can't ever imagine you guys implementing that, but I think it is a real asset for Australia, um, in reducing political polarization for the reason I stated. And secondly, that we managed to tackle the problem of, uh, gun laws back in the 1990s, and it was a conservative prime minister, a great friend of, of, uh, George W. Bush, uh, John Howard, a Liberal prime minister, who instituted, uh, gun buybacks and gun regulations after the Port Arthur massacre. And that is something we're really proud of. That is something that I would love to see you guys study in more detail, because it was a conservative prime minister who did it.

01:48:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but that's... Okay. Well, can I, can I give you my reactions? First of all, I don't think you guys-

01:48:29
Joe Walker: Yes

01:48:29
Eric Weinstein: ... are in a position to lead yet with respect to-

01:48:33
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:48:33
Eric Weinstein: ... the US. Um, our particular relationship to firearms is different from yours, and the Port Arthur example is trotted out inside of the American left, generally speaking, just the way Sweden is held up as a model economy, and it doesn't have the same resonance-

01:48:52
Joe Walker: Right

01:48:52
Eric Weinstein: ... because of the issue of American exceptionalism.

01:48:55
Joe Walker: Okay.

01:48:55
Eric Weinstein: So, my point is, is that you, you need to get our attention first if you're gonna really lead, and the way to get our attention-

01:49:04
Joe Walker: Yeah

01:49:06
Eric Weinstein: ... is not necessarily-

01:49:07
Joe Walker: Do more podcasts. [both laughing]

01:49:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. But, but I would say different than that. Um, see whether you can't... Look, y- just in the same way I'm gonna tell you that I don't think that, uh... Feel free to tell me to, to buzz off, but were I Australian, here's here, here's how I might be thinking.

01:49:29
Joe Walker: No, I'm interested to hear.

01:49:31
Eric Weinstein: Okay. I'd be thinking the following Right now, what's really going on is that it's hard to find any place that hews close enough to enlightenment values and believes in rugged individualism enough to leave space for radical innovation, which we desperately need. So it's wonderful to talk about compulsory voting or, you know, i-increases in human capital and all these sort of general things. But right now there's a different-

01:50:07
Joe Walker: Mm

01:50:07
Eric Weinstein: ... opportunity which we don't seem to be capable of capitalizing on. So that's why I, I point it out to you. Now, you may not be able to capitalize on it either. It may be that it goes begging, but here's the opportunity. The world's mutants need some place to go coalesce and play.

01:50:28
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

01:50:29
Eric Weinstein: And if you think about all of like, you know, what does our fiction look like? It looks like the Avengers, a bunch of mutants, the X-Men, a bunch of mutants, Harry Potter, a bunch of mutants, mutants, mutants, mutants, mutants. What is that about? It's a metaphor. It's a metaphor for the dangerous and often uncorrelated, disagreeable people who have pushed human history forward. Now, at the moment, they can't find a place to play that is safe from all of the impetus towards social engineering, because social engineering begins with social. Very often, these people are deeply social, but in a very far-ranging way that is perceived as antisocial. You know, I don't know that Julian Assange is a bad guy at all. I don't really know what his game is or who controls him exactly, but it's entirely possible that he's just a renegade, uh, for some kind of freedom who is at times well-guided and at other times misguided. I don't know. But my point would be this: the power comes from the mutants, and the mutants have no place that is safe for them to play anymore. Well, you guys got nothing but space, and you've got a rivalry between two great cities, and you've got a, a city that's so remote that it's like Australia's Australia in Perth. You know? Um, it's way over on the, on the wrong side of the country. Why not instead specifically start advertising to build your Silicon Valley by going after the people that nobody else seems to want at the moment, the digital nomads, the scientific nomads who can't find a place to play? Go dig some holes, man. You guys are sitting on top of incredible mineral resources all... Right? You, you and Canada.

01:52:24
Joe Walker: Yeah.

01:52:25
Eric Weinstein: Go dig up some treasure.

01:52:26
Joe Walker: So what are some examples of... Sorry, what, what are some examples of practical policies that would attract these mutants?

01:52:35
Eric Weinstein: Um, come up with like a- an Australian national interest exemption from social engineering, that any, any outfit, like a, something smaller than a research university, something smaller than a large startup, any high-intensity group dedicated to breaking new frontiers is exempt from social engineering requirements. Right? We're not gonna try to take, you know, get you to take loyalty oaths to diversity and inclusion. We're gonna look for people who are absolutely fantastic at what they do, and anybody who wants transparency in is entitled to only a minimum amount of insight. We're not going to do social engineering experiments. We're gonna go for people who are terribly committed to whatever it is that they do, right? [sniffs] And you, you create a world for mutants to play. That's what created Silicon Valley. And if you can't figure out a way of doing that because somebody's gonna start clutching their pearls and say, "Oh my God, what this is is just another way for the old bad ways to, uh, to in-infect the system," um, then you won't be able to take advantage o-of this. But quite honestly, many of the world's most innovative people are very difficult to deal with. You know, we've talked about Peter Thiel. We've talked about me. We've talked about, um, Nassim Taleb. You have an interest in people who are not necessarily inside cats, right? And those people right now need a clubhouse, and the logical clubhouse is probably Australia or New Zealand.

01:54:20
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

01:54:21
Eric Weinstein: And I think that the world would flock to a place with first-class infrastructure. The idea of you guys as second-rate minds is a joke, or whatever, whatever that thing was in the lucky country, right? You guys are much better than that. And what, w-what, what Australia needs is to just slough that stuff off, man. Like you guys, this is your moment. The UK and the US are stumbling and there's no place to play. Be that place. Tell the people who are going to hold you back, "No, they need some corner of our country. They need some corner of our laws. We need exemptions." Rather than lecturing us about Port Arthur, which probably would be a good thing for the US, uh, you know, I don't know.

01:55:08
Joe Walker: [chuckles]

01:55:09
Eric Weinstein: Right? Instead, show us how you do a carve-out so that we don't gamble the entire system on new concepts of social engineering that have been around for like four minutes.

01:55:23
Joe Walker: Mm.

01:55:23
Eric Weinstein: You know? Like nobody knows... I, I, I have no idea, for example. The-- Twitter is a US company. I know-- I don't know whether I can mention that, uh, Walter Carlos did "Switched On Bach" on the Moog synthesizer Because he then became Wendy Carlos, and Twitter issued a policy that said deadnaming is a reason to be kicked off of the system. Well, that's an incredibly vague thing to do, to tell somebody that a following they've built up over a decade is at risk if they simply say that Walter Carlos, uh, produced "Switched-On Bach." Right? That's what happens when you take a very new idea like deadnaming and you apply it with no con- no idea what the consequence is. All right. Well, l- let all of the experience that we've accumulated since the Enlightenment be put to work someplace without betting the entire stack on the, the most untested ideas of the last four minutes. It's just... Be that place. If you guys want it, you could be in a place within 10 years to lecture from a position of strength and saying, "We used to be holes in homes," right? "But we're now actually about minds." What, what if instead of like y- y- you guys seem to have incredibly good-looking people that you keep sending to Hollywood. Instead of sending us incredibly good-looking people, send us incredibly dangerous people and the fruits of their labor. I think Australia, uh, you guys have what? About 25 million people?

01:57:10
Joe Walker: Correct.

01:57:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Uh, it's not huge, but it's not small like New Zealand, which is like three million, or I forget what it is exactly. You know, it's enough to, to take some very big risks, and the b- the best risk-

01:57:24
Joe Walker: Mm

01:57:25
Eric Weinstein: ... is to give the world's most dangerous, productive minds who have a long-range idea about contributing to human progress a place to play with each other without constantly subjecting them to abuse, to social engineering, and to untried ideas which probably could be proven not to be workable within, uh, you know, a few minutes', uh, analytic consideration. A-a-and you know, another thing you could do is you could, you could try to show us how to work out the best aspirations of social justice, um, in your multicultural society. Maybe the idea is that you could send us a workable version of, of social justice that gives us tolerance for trans people and that shows us ways in which, uh, different ethnic communities can avoid, uh, communalism that, you know, is toxic in other parts of the world. I don't know. But the thing that would be most inspiring to me is become the refuge for the uncorrelated, for the disagreeable, and for the highly agentic, because in part, that fits the Australian character. If you think about all those rugged white guys from, from days of yore, think about that in two different pieces. There's the hardware that that ruggedness was running on, which doesn't need to be white. I don't think anybody's that interested in the hardware. But the software of the Australian character, right? That's something worth preserving. And the idea that, that, you know, tomorrow's, uh, Crocodile Dundee is going to be in fact, um, a theoretical physicist of South Asian des- descent, you know, with that kind of hearty mentality and good self-deprecating humor, that's fricking appealing. Send us some stuff like that. Well, you know, show us in some sense how to divorce the hardware issues from the software issues, keep the national character, and take that distance, that glorious isolation, which also puts you very close to China, which I'm not sure feels very isolating at the moment, and show us something new.

01:59:34
Joe Walker: Well, yeah, it's a, it's a two-edged sword. Yeah.

01:59:38
Eric Weinstein: Well, I'm just saying that I think that partially that distance was measured from Europe and the States, and you guys now have front row seats to the Pacific.

01:59:47
Joe Walker: Yes, correct. Another thing that I think is beautiful about Australia is, uh, we are a more equal society than in America, although since the 1980s, we've become more unequal, uh, and the trend is worrying. But f- I think your Gini coefficient is like 0.43. Our Gini coefficient is about 0.34. And not only do we have that substantive... Uh, not only are we substantively more equal, but there's like a, a social layer of egalitarianism over the top as well. You know, we sit in the front seat of taxis. I, I love that about Australia.

02:00:35
Eric Weinstein: You're an unpretentious society for the most part, because quite frankly-

02:00:38
Joe Walker: Yeah

02:00:38
Eric Weinstein: ... you probably can't measure, uh, you can't, uh, easily produce, let's say, luxury brands the way France and Italy can, you know? You know, in general, we look to Australia for something very different. And the other part of that is, is that how much of that money did you pull out of the ground? Huge amount. And so the idea that it's coming out of the ground, um, gives you an idea that you're really exploiting sort of an accident of geography. I mean, there, there is this weird curse, which is may you, may you be rich in mineral wealth. Usually, that deranges a society. I think you guys have managed it better than most.

02:01:16
Joe Walker: Mm.

02:01:16
Eric Weinstein: So whatever that is, I think that's not my point. My point is, um, time to lead, uh, and-

02:01:24
Joe Walker: Yeah

02:01:24
Eric Weinstein: ... that that leadership can come from showing that you have enough confidence in yourself that you realize that giving over, I don't know, 5% of your immigration to mutants, um, people who could actually dangerously do something new, and to welcome that disruption at a time when everybody else is trying to control what's going on, and you guys wanna run something less controlled, that would inspire... I would certainly consider moving to Australia over that And I think-

02:01:55
Joe Walker: Mm.

02:01:55
Eric Weinstein: I think at a time when nobody else can figure out how to get kind of the intellectual oxygen or some kind of commitment to research, you guys are very well positioned.

02:02:04
Joe Walker: Yeah. What are some examples of ways you would identify and screen for mutants apart from having like a check this box if you're a self-described mutant on the immigration forms?

02:02:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, um, it goes back to, uh, [chuckles] it's a little bit like refugee status where you have a, a well-founded fear of persecution. You know, uh, what is it that you want to research? Like Aubrey de Grey, for example, wants to make people, uh, as close to immortal as he can by reducing senescence or aging to an engineering puzzle.

02:02:41
Joe Walker: Yeah.

02:02:42
Eric Weinstein: Is he welcome? That's very different than asking a typical geriat- um, re-researcher on geriatric disease whether they should have a position inside of... You know? So, so for example-

02:02:56
Joe Walker: Mm

02:02:57
Eric Weinstein: ... um, look for very unusual publication profiles. Very often people who are known, uh, to the top people in the field to be very good but who are having trouble getting a job in a research field, that would be a kind of a, a tell.

02:03:11
Joe Walker: Yeah.

02:03:12
Eric Weinstein: Um, you know, invite a few people like I th- was it, uh, Singapore that invited Sydney Brenner to be a, a biologist?

02:03:22
Joe Walker: Uh, no.

02:03:22
Eric Weinstein: So he was the guy who, who came up with C. elegans, the nematode, as a model organism, and was one of the pioneers-

02:03:28
Joe Walker: Yeah

02:03:28
Eric Weinstein: ... of molecular biology. Start poaching our absolute best people and pay them the tiny pittance above what they're paid now that would be necessary to attract them for half the year, and then ask them, "Who are the most dangerous people in these fields that nobody wants to hire because they're too disruptive?" Like for example, a lot of our-

02:03:46
Joe Walker: Mm

02:03:47
Eric Weinstein: ... universities are, are adopting informal, quote, no assholes, close quote, policies. Now the people that they're targeting are not usually assholes. They're just people who are highly disagreeable. So give Big Five personality inventories to people and start selecting for disagreeability rather than for a kind of agreeable pro-social orientation.

02:04:10
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm.

02:04:12
Eric Weinstein: I'm just telling you that really what's going on at the moment is, is that the world's most agentic people are having trouble finding any institutions that'll welcome them, which is very different. And if you want to know what, you know, how to found the next Silicon Valley, that's the key.

02:04:28
Joe Walker: Thank you, Eric. I love that. Tyler Cowen once said of you, "If you wish to sit down and chat with someone and receive new and interesting and original ideas, Eric is one of the most generative people I know, easily in the top five or higher yet, and I know a number of very smart others who would concur in this claim. Quite simply, that is the source of Eric's influence and semi-fame, and if one does not know that, one does not know Eric." In light of your being a very generative individual, I compiled a list off the top of my head of different phrases or neologisms that you've coined because you're a great coiner of phrases. And I'll, I'll rattle some off-

02:05:15
Eric Weinstein: Joseph, I always knew that this day would come [laughs]

02:05:19
Joe Walker: [laughs] That someone would compile the list?

02:05:21
Eric Weinstein: All right.

02:05:23
Joe Walker: I've made a first pass.

02:05:24
Eric Weinstein: Go ahead.

02:05:25
Joe Walker: So here, here's what I've got. [lips smack] Intellectual dark web, sensemaking apparatus, gated institutional narrative, embedded growth obligation, great oppression shortage, distributed idea suppression complex, baby boomer bubble, intersectional shakedown, vampire effect, environment of evolutionary novelty, hate blinding, and anthropic capitalism. Uh, no doubt I've, I've missed, uh, many Weinsteinisms, but I wanna ask about one of them in particular. We're not gonna have time to talk about all of them, but the one that interests me most right now is the last one, and that is anthropic capitalism-

02:06:12
Eric Weinstein: Mm

02:06:12
Joe Walker: ... which harks back to an article you wrote for edge.org several years ago, and I, I thought it was one of your most, your most brilliant coinages, uh, anthropic capitalism. I'd like to speak with you about that, but, but, but let me, let me begin this way. So Paul Krugman has said many things, but one of the most, uh, true things I think he said is that in the long run, all that matters is productivity, and I think we could add or tack onto that, that in turn the thing that's most important to productivity is, is technological growth. But something really puzzling happened around 1973, which was that productivity growth started to stagnate in the West. And I wanted to ask you, do you accept, you know, Robert Gordon's premise that we simply picked all the low-hanging fruit of technology, for example, electricity and motor cars, or do you think something else has happened? What, what, what accounts for our productivity stagnation?

02:07:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, first of all, I don't think that it shows up exactly as a productivity stagnation, um, in 1973. So by some measures, GDP keeps growing, but it's the distribution of GDP that changes markedly. Um, and Tyler Cowen's innovation, since we're-- he said nice things about me, I'll try to say something nice about him. Uh, he focused us on median male income, which effectively flatlines in 1973 after having-

02:07:44
Joe Walker: Mm

02:07:44
Eric Weinstein: ... been perfectly correlated almost with GDP growth. Um, the-- Certainly not all productivity, um has come to a standstill. Uh, in general, the two great revolutions having to do with the semiconductor and communications come to a co-collision in the modern smartphone, to say nothing of innovations like fracking or certain imaging techniques and surgery. So we don't wanna overdo the le- the level of stagnation. But in general, I think what, what happened is, is that there was this thing that I call umwelt hacking, uh, which you can add to that terrible list.

02:08:22
Joe Walker: Oof. We'll add to that one. [chuckles]

02:08:24
Eric Weinstein: So u- the umwelt is what it is that you can perceive, right? So you can't perceive infrared or ultraviolet or radio waves. You can't see the Wi-Fi networks that are presumably all around you, um, because they're not part of your umwelt, but if you have a computer, you can open it up and see what networks are available. So that would bring new things into your umwelt. In general, what we did was made-- um, we found instruments that allowed us to make small things large, large things small, fast things slow, slow things fast, so we could see more of the world. The more we could see for a, for a time, the more we could put to use. So we found that there were lots of technological innovations that were beyond our original umwelt, which instruments put within our reach, and then we found lots of, lots of applications. And I think, uh, again, I sort of make these points somewhat simplistically, but I try to do it in a stylized fashion so people can remember them. When in the late '60s, we found out that protons and neutrons were not fundamental particles, but were themselves com-comprised of up quarks and down quarks, there were no industrial im-implications of that. We had somehow gotten to a level of umwelt hacking where we could perceive things that we could not use. So a lot of what's happened is, is that we've continued to find new things, but we haven't been able to put them to use because they're too far outside of our umwelts in some way or the other. They have characteristics-

02:09:51
Joe Walker: Hmm

02:09:51
Eric Weinstein: ... that are hard to manipulate. So part of that, I think, is, is, uh, involved in our productivity slowdown. I also think that, you know, y- there are problems, of course, where, uh, you say that in the long run, prog- uh, GDP and productivity is all that matters, but of course, Keynes said in the long run, we're all dead. It's not really clear, um, how you couple those two statements. I think that distribution has turned out to be much more important than many economists like, uh, Dr. Krugman, uh, might have initially realized when he was writing when our Gini coefficient was a bit lower. You can, you can blow up a perfectly good country by doing invidious things that pit us against each other. Um, so you may never get to that long run, uh, beautiful growth path if too many people are left behind, and that's one of the reasons why I think that we have to be very vigilant about making sure that, uh, we don't get too bound up in our measurements and metrics to notice that, that people are suffering and struggling and starving, and that those people, um, need futures. Um, we can't afford, you know-

02:11:02
Joe Walker: Mm

02:11:02
Eric Weinstein: ... with respect to GDP, a lot of it is correlated to how much fossil fuel you burn, and we need to find forms of GDP that are not effectively, uh, highly correlated with, um, carbon, you know, for, for lack of a better, uh, way of describing it. We have to find perhaps new forms of intellectual productivity that don't come from, uh, miner- mineral rights expenditures. I think where we are is that we're in a very delicate place where capitalism has served us well and is sputtering, and you can try to fix it to some extent, but you may also start having to think about, well, what happens when market failure becomes a more dominant portion of the economic pie? The, you know, in that article on anthropic capitalism, I talk about public goods, um, being a fraction of the economy because they're a, an example of market failure. However, it is definitely the case that you could have a world in which, uh, most of the activity was in public goods, and then markets wouldn't work very well at all. So I think we're in a very dangerous, interesting place, and this comes back to Australia. Uh, if we're still locked in old paradigms, what would happen if you had a new university department that wasn't trying to fo- you know, figure out whether it wanted to follow, um, you know, Harvard or Chicago economics, but instead said, "Hey, we need an entirely new economics that's not predicated upon extensh- um, expanding around perfect market hypotheses. Why don't we actually expand around more standard hypotheses, which is that lots of goods and services will be public, lots of information failures are present, lots of, uh, externalities, uh, go unpriced, both positive and negative, and try to figure out a more realistic econo- economics around that"? Uh, that would be super exciting. Somebody's gotta do it, but we're not really capable of doing that at the moment, and I think what we're gonna find is, is that if we don't start trying to invent the future with new language and new, new thought paradigms... One of the reasons I'm trying to be generative is I'm trying to push out new cognitive Lego for others to play with, um, because I'm worried that the old pieces aren't sufficiently expressive to get to the answers that we need, so you can't reach them from here. Um, my belief is, is that our, our economics was based around an older form of capitalism that worked for a while and is working far less well and is gonna continue to sputter into the future.

02:13:43
Joe Walker: Can you briefly explain the anthropic principle just so that analogy with anthropic capitalism is apparent to people?

02:13:50
Eric Weinstein: Sure. It, it's really based on a form of survivor bias, and it-- what it says is-

02:13:55
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm

02:13:56
Eric Weinstein: ... that the world looks very well-tuned for life to exist. So the idea is that when we're at the conclusion of this interview I have an entire planet pulling me towards my chair, and my l- my legs are going to get up and walk, uh, to the kitchen and get a fresh glass of water. How is it that my legs are just barely capable of overwhelming the pull of an entire planet? It seems like an incredible coincidence. However, if it weren't that way, would I even be possibly extant in order to have the thought, why is it this way? So in other words, the only reason there's an Eric to question why, uh, the chemical, uh, strength of the reactions in my legs is able to counterbalance gravity is because the world is incredibly finely tuned. Why is it that I don't fear touching metal objects in general when even a slight bal- imbalance of electrons can cause a nasty electric shock? The world seems, again, almost perfectly balanced. So over and over again in nature, we have these mysteries about why is the world so strangely balanced for life to exist? And there's a way of turning that around which says, well, because life wouldn't be around to contemplate that question were it any other way. So that's sort of the anthropic approach to fine-tuning problems in physics. Now-

02:15:21
Joe Walker: Yeah

02:15:21
Eric Weinstein: ... perhaps the only reason that we're in a position to look at the marvelous nature of capitalism the way we do is, is that capitalism has been the right answer for a couple hundred years.

02:15:34
Joe Walker: There was just a combination of historical contingencies that were fertile ground for, for the capitalism.

02:15:42
Eric Weinstein: Well, for example, just take a simp- sim- simple parameter. What percentage of the economy looks like a public good? That is something that is both inexhaustible and inexcludable. So in general, um, you know, a lighthouse is an example that you can't keep somebody else from consuming it. You can't exclude them. If the light is on, the light can be seen by everyone. And, um, in general, it's nearly inexhaustible in that my ability to see the light doesn't preclude your ability to see the light if you're a different ship at sea, unless you're directly in, in, in the shadow, okay? The claim is, is that those things, even by free market enthusiasts, would be considered market failures. The market cannot figure out how to price them properly. So ask a simple question: What percentage of economic activity in, by some measure, falls into the public good category of market failure? If that's small, then you probably think about market economies with a small amount of activity gotten from taxing private goods and services to pay for the market failure sector called public goods and services. What if it's the reverse? What if 90% of the goods and services are public goods and services where markets can't get price and value to coincide? Then you have no ability to really sort of tax the 10% of the activity that is private goods and services to manage all of the rest. So that's a good example of an anthropic principle, which is that, um, markets work best when externalities are small, when public goods and services are a small sector, when information is relatively uniform, and there's no reason to think that all of those things will continue to be as true as they've been in the past.

02:17:30
Joe Walker: Hmm. Peter Thiel's quite famous for saying that we should focus more on vertical growth or technology rather than horizontal growth or globalization. I wonder whether he has overplayed that dichotomy because surely extending the fruits of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution to the entire world increases our chances of finding the next Einstein or, or Tesla. Uh, what, what do you think about that?

02:18:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, see, this is again one of these poison frame questions [chuckles] that we were talking about before with Naseem. Like, do I hesitate to point out that if you wanted to bring the whole world up to close to Australian, uh, GDP, you might be talking about an-

02:18:21
Joe Walker: Mm

02:18:21
Eric Weinstein: ... ecological disaster? Yeah. You know-

02:18:25
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm

02:18:25
Eric Weinstein: ... if, if all of Bangladesh and India were suddenly earning, you know, close to $60,000 US a year, uh, per capita, and we didn't do anything... Remember I said this point about, um, much of GDP growth is tied to how much, uh, carbon, um, you're, you're burning. Um, if we dream about a beautiful day in which we are all equal economically at a highly developed, uh, an industrialized nation level, we may not realize that we're dreaming about ecological disaster. So-

02:19:01
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm

02:19:02
Eric Weinstein: ... like even there in the frame, I don't really wanna point that out because now I'm-- the next question's gonna be, "Well, are you saying you don't want the people in Bangladesh to be consuming at the level of the people in Luxembourg?" No, you don't wanna say that. Do you-- Are you telling the people in Luxembourg that they should give up their luxurious lifety- lifestyles? Well, that doesn't sound very realistic. So we have real questions and problems about globalization, distribution, resource management that we're all wimping out of. And the key point, and I'm gonna come back to it one more time 'cause, uh, it's a great opportunity, [chuckles] it's a great opportunity to illustrate the Australian opportunity. If you can form the place where we actually get to have these discussions and we get to kick everybody out of the room who's not grown up enough to see what we're actually up against, I'll, I'll come every year, you know, to, to, to, to teach, to lecture, and contribute. The problem is we're, we're not-

02:20:00
Joe Walker: They want you here

02:20:01
Eric Weinstein: ... having adult conversations. We're having-- We're adults having children's conversations about all of these things because we're using intellectual primitives that we've outgrown. It's all baby talk

02:20:14
Joe Walker: Douglas Adams gave quite a famous illustration of the anthropic principle where he said, "Imagine a puddle, like a puddle of water waking up one morning and thinking, 'Gee, this, uh, this hole fits me staggeringly well. It must have been made just to have me in it.'" Um, running with that metaphor for a moment, if we're growing too big for the hole we're currently in, what, what's next for us? Like where-- how do you think we get out of this situation?

02:20:48
Eric Weinstein: We have to leave.

02:20:52
Joe Walker: Find the source code?

02:20:53
Eric Weinstein: I mean, look, this is-

02:20:55
Joe Walker: Leave the planet?

02:20:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, but there's nowhere to go locally. Are you gonna go to Mars? The Moon?

02:21:02
Joe Walker: Yeah.

02:21:02
Eric Weinstein: You think Elon's, Elon's gonna form cities on Mars?

02:21:08
Joe Walker: Well, I mean, if we have the technology to terraform Mars, it feels plausible that we'd have technology that could-

02:21:20
Eric Weinstein: Great. So let's terraform Mars. Let's terraform the Moon

02:21:23
Joe Walker: ... could get more out of the Earth. Yeah.

02:21:25
Eric Weinstein: Let's c- let's colonize every rocky planet in our solar system. All of the moons too.

02:21:32
Joe Walker: Yeah.

02:21:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay? And let's get the temperature up. Let's, let's, let's pretend that we're even close, which we absolutely are not.

02:21:38
Joe Walker: Yeah.

02:21:39
Eric Weinstein: There's not enough diversification to run this experiment long term. Our destructive power is far too impressive relative... You were talking about who should have the nuclear codes.

02:21:51
Joe Walker: Mm.

02:21:53
Eric Weinstein: W- we do not appear to be developing wisdom at any rate comparable to that which we've developed power. We do not, we do not also have any means of keeping power expensive, because markets are efficient in making incredible leverage and power very cheap, which means that fewer... I mean, more destructive technology is going to be within reach of more people as time goes on, unless something very strange happens. And our destructive power is already incalculable. It's just weird that through some magical process, it hasn't been used much since 1945. Um, the really weird thing to say is think about your best explanation for the next 2,000 years of humanity, assuming that humanity is still here 2,000 years from now. How do we get there 2,000 years from now? Did we become wise? Did we become kind? Did we become incredibly good at conflict resolution? Did we forget the power of destruction that we unleashed with the H-bomb? Did we branch out and we lost a few planets, but we had others? There is no plausible scenario that I see, um, for the maintenance of our new godlike powers in a small number of diversified games. And, and the, the main three are the Moon, Mars, and Earth, which is incredibly apocalyptic. Um-

02:23:39
Joe Walker: Mm.

02:23:40
Eric Weinstein: But I can't... Like, every branch of the decision tree is preposterous. It's preposterous to me that we're about to self-extinguish, considering that nothing much has happened since 1945, with, with a few notable exceptions. Um, it's preposterous to me that we're not gonna self-extinguish. It's preposterous to me that we're gonna upload ourselves into silicon. It's preposterous to me that we're gonna discover that we're the simulation, uh, of another group of people. But if you asked me what is the best hope we have, um, it's pretty clear to me that, uh, it's either some incredible innovation in human dispute resolution and prosperity, uh, that I can't even conceive of, but okay, or go out to the back of beyond where there's no light pollution and look up at the night sky and try to imagine that we're really one Einsteinian restriction away from some possibility of visiting an incalculable number of new homes. And if that doesn't animate you, given what you know about, uh, the blast radius of, let's say, um, the nuclear test that the Russians called Tsar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear device ever exploded, and you can superimpose that on your favorite city if you like. Um, my hope is, is that we're going to escape, and we're gonna escape by learning our own source code and finding out that there is a cheat code to get us to the stars that shows that we can evade the Einsteinian restrictions. And there's one phrase that I haven't been able to shake. Um, I don't know where it came from. It just sort of popped into my head one day, and I haven't been able to stop repeating it, so I, I'll share it with you, which is that the home-- our home is in the stars or not at all. And it's a slim hope, um, but we have to realize that we are now, as I've... Another one of the quotes that is attributed to me is, "We are now gods but for the wisdom." Um, we have not reconciled ourselves to godlike powers, and we've been incredibly lucky for a very short period of time. But, uh, I would say that that luck is going to run out within the next 50 years, maybe sooner.

02:26:13
Joe Walker: Eric, I think that's a Interesting and poignant note to finish on. I have a list of kind of random questions, but maybe, maybe I'll save them for-

02:26:22
Eric Weinstein: Don't you wanna ask me about my favorite album?

02:26:24
Joe Walker: Yeah, and what star sign you are.

02:26:28
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:26:29
Joe Walker: [laughs] I mean, I could go through these random questions.

02:26:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:26:34
Joe Walker: Should we?

02:26:35
Eric Weinstein: Let, let... Yeah, let's do something more optimistic because I don't wanna enervate people, I wanna excite people, man. What do you got?

02:26:41
Joe Walker: All right. I got a bunch of stuff. It's pretty random. Um, I've got about eight of them, so I'll try and fire them off quickly. You c- Okay?

02:26:51
Eric Weinstein: All right. What do we g- What do we have?

02:26:53
Joe Walker: All right. The first one is, like you, I watched some of the ISIS execution videos because I wanted to see what humanity was capable of inflicting on itself in its full unadulterated horror. Um, some of the videos literally made me sick, the Jordanian pilot video, some of the drowning videos, um, the elaborate methods of torture and execution.

02:27:14
Eric Weinstein: And how about the cinematic, uh, flair with which these people shot those videos? I mean, those are absolutely bloodcurdlingly gorgeous.

02:27:23
Joe Walker: Yeah, and that, that made it extra horrifying.

02:27:26
Eric Weinstein: Absolutely. That was its intention.

02:27:28
Joe Walker: Yeah.

02:27:28
Eric Weinstein: All right, keep going.

02:27:30
Joe Walker: Now, what did you... What general, what general principle or idea or message did you extract from your experience seeing those videos?

02:27:39
Eric Weinstein: It's message violence.

02:27:41
Joe Walker: And what's that?

02:27:43
Eric Weinstein: Message violence is where somebody does something with violence that is so picturesque that they increase the leverage. The Jordanian pilot video, one Jordanian pilot was executed. But the leverage-

02:27:54
Joe Walker: Yeah

02:27:54
Eric Weinstein: ... from that execution was unbelievable because of the production values and the messaging. So, what we didn't transmit to people who didn't watch the video was is that the pilot was involved in an ISIS morality play where he had rained death from the skies in two forms, incendiary death and death by rubble. And so he was going to be subjected, in the eyes of ISIS, to the twin deaths that he had meted out from above. So he was going to be immolated in flame, and then the cage in which he was immolated was going to be covered in rubble.

02:28:32
Joe Walker: Hmm.

02:28:33
Eric Weinstein: So, it's-- You have to appreciate that message violets, message violence is a very little studied tool by which a small amount of violence is used for maximal effect usually in order to communicate, um, terror into the hearts of an adversary.

02:28:56
Joe Walker: Next random question. What advice do you have for young men-

02:29:00
Eric Weinstein: By the way, I didn't find that, that uplifting, but keep going.

02:29:03
Joe Walker: No, no, we're getting-

02:29:04
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:29:04
Joe Walker: ... gonna get progressively more uplifting from, [laughs] from that. Your friend Sam Harris is a famous philosopher, and I like Sam Harris. However, I don't like his book "The Moral Landscape." I think it's stupid. I think if the book achieves what it purports to do, it would be a work of philosophical genius, that is breaking down Hume's famous is-ought distinction. Sam argues that we can get values from scientific facts. I think essentially the book is just an argument for utilitarianism. Have you read his book, "The Moral Landscape"? And have you had any conversations with Sam about the book?

02:29:42
Eric Weinstein: I, I have had conversations in this area with Sam. I've not read the book. And the is-ought distinction, I think you have to decide where you think morality comes from. In general, there's, I think, a complicated transit, transmission mechanism, which is morality is usually, and this is something I've said elsewhere, people don't like it, a tool for beating other tribes. You show morality within a tribe, which allows you to solve various prisoner's dilemmas, and that ability to solve prisoner's dilemmas gives you a, a competitive edge over those tribes that are beset by infighting and immorality within group. Now, that then comes the question of, okay, well, how does that reside in the mind? In general, religion, I think, is the answer to how to keep humans from becoming self-aware and having soma, that is the part of our bodies that don't rep- uh, reproduce, interfering with germ, because our bodies are structured around proximate versus ultimate goals. And so the, the problem is, is that we enjoy food, let's say, because we don't want to starve. And so our bodies note that hunger feels better when sated as a means of making sure we are nourished, and thirst, uh, is the proximate for dehydration, so that causes us to drink and feel better. The great danger in humans is that we can always wake up and s- decide that the purpose of life is to be happy, which is a disaster, because that would mean that soma would serve its own proximate needs, unhooking itself from germ. And religion is the thing that keeps us focused on intergenerational issues, so that we don't become somatically obsessed by our own happiness and not worry about what happens in the generations to come. So my belief is, is that if you actually take a very scientific and very rationalist approach, you understand the value of religion, you understand the great danger of rationality if practiced incompletely, and you realize that, in fact, the great danger of soma to germ has to be met in one form or another, and that morality probably is about defeating other groups rather than a universal moral prescription to be spread, uh, for peace, unity, and kumbaya.

02:32:04
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm. As a jack of all trades, master of many, how do you handle being accused of speaking on topics for which you have no formal qualification?

02:32:15
Eric Weinstein: By admitting it directly. I speak on topics for which I have no formal qualification

02:32:23
Joe Walker: Why have you never written a book?

02:32:26
Eric Weinstein: Have you written a book?

02:32:29
Joe Walker: Nope. [chuckles]

02:32:30
Eric Weinstein: Why have you never written a book?

02:32:32
Joe Walker: Me?

02:32:32
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:32:34
Joe Walker: It's coming. It's just not ready.

02:32:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Okay. Same for me.

02:32:38
Joe Walker: Okay. Have you learned anything from your Portal guests that you didn't already know? What one or two lessons stand out if you did learn anything?

02:32:48
Eric Weinstein: Um, well, I, I would say that the SS officer's granddaughter, Julie Lindahl, taught me something about, um, how much courage it can take to wrestle with, uh, with one's own identity and self. That would be a good example. Um, I was surprised that, uh, Rabbi Wolpe said that Judaism wasn't really a religion. Uh, I thought that was an interesting interchange. Um, I think just about everything Peter and Sam say is pretty fascinating. Um, I have to say one of the least, uh, obviously successful interviews was probably Jocko and myself because we didn't find our way towards the conversation we were meant to have twil- till towards the end of the interview. But I have to say that I just find him tremendously inspiring, um, as a, as a war hero coming home who clearly has the programming to continue being a war hero, and his courage to write children's books is different than his courage to confront ISIS. And, um, in a weird way, that was a, that was a heartwarming episode. And I also-- Here's some weird thing. Um, I had to accept that I have a powerful ability to do good that came out of the London Psy episode, where I took a guy whose work I've greatly admired, but he, he'd sort of weirdly given up on some of his art, and it was just in bubble wrap because nobody understood what it was. And I realized that if I was too humble about my ability to move hearts and minds, that his art and his life would never be served. And that was, like, a weird thing, which is to understand that, okay, humility even is a double-edged sword. If you don't have it, then you, you become drunk on your own supply. But if you have too much of it, you can't even help people where you're in a position to help people. And, um, I think that was a new moral quandary for me, is to sort of accept that this is actually working fairly well. And I have, I have a huge desire to give back to people in particular who mirrored my previous set of challenges, which is that I felt like I was saying interesting things and speaking clearly, and I couldn't get heard. So, I think one of the things that I've decided to do is I have to interview well-known people and, and talk about things that are gonna build my audience. And then I have to spend some of that talking to people nobody's ever heard of, but where I really believe in that person, their mission, and I have to put my success in service to them and then urge them to pass it on if they, if they can and build themselves up. So, one of the thing is, is that The Portal is coming looking for people who are being ignored but who have something important to say, and I've had to accept that I have a role in that.

02:35:55
Joe Walker: Mm-hmm. Third last question. Now that your children are teenagers, do you recall any pieces of advice you've given them as a parent where you're like, "Man, I nailed that"?

02:36:13
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Um-

02:36:17
Joe Walker: Can you share it?

02:36:25
Eric Weinstein: I think that encouraging my children by talking to them in an adult voice about adult topics from a very early age was a good move, which is-- The parenting would be you can't push your children because you can turn any child successfully into a prodigy just through pressure. It's an emergency program that the brain maintains in case, um, let's say a parent is lost or two parents are lost and the child has to take over. But you don't in general want to create prodigies out of your children for your own amusement, which is a very narcissistic endeavor. But you can put anything in front of a child, and if the child isn't interested, they won't play with it. I think we put things in front of our children at a very early age and didn't push. A l- mo- many of those things were pushed away. Um, but, like, you know, I wrote an entire story for my daughter consisting only of two-letter words, and it turned out she could read it.

02:37:30
Joe Walker: Wait, wait, what? [chuckles]

02:37:34
Eric Weinstein: Like-

02:37:34
Joe Walker: What y- How, how does that work?

02:37:36
Eric Weinstein: You know, uh, Joe is an ox. J-O-I-S a-n ox.

02:37:44
Joe Walker: Oh, okay. Got it. Okay. Right. Yeah.

02:37:45
Eric Weinstein: I am on Joe. Go, Joe. Right? And so the idea is that the brain may not be ready to break up, uh, words that are five letters in length, but if everything is two letters in length, it's am- remarkable how quickly, uh, the experience of reading can be felt.

02:38:11
Joe Walker: Hmm.

02:38:12
Eric Weinstein: I don't know why nobody ever did that. I mean-

02:38:15
Joe Walker: Yeah

02:38:15
Eric Weinstein: ... mayb- maybe lots of people have found this, but I d- I did, I did-- nobody told me to do that. That was a great exercise.

02:38:22
Joe Walker: Beautiful. Second last question. In 2017, about a week or two after the Google memo scandal, I had James Damore on the podcast. Uh, I was quite nervous at the time because I was worried about the professional ramifications for myself, um, given the toxicity around the debate. And I have to confess, I did something cowardly. I can't remember what it was, but I kind of prefaced the episode in my introduction and in the blurb for the podcast with distancing myself from Damore, even though, you know, I was still, quote-unquote, "giving him a platform." The thing that chilled me the most about the whole James Damore episode is he literally wrote a memo. Like, his reasoning was there for all to see, if you could spare the 20 to 30 minutes, and yet that still didn't get him out of hot water. A-and I think he was quite clear to say that he wasn't making an argument about differences in abilities, just differences in preferences or interests on average, uh, between men and women in the Google memo, but he was still sacrificed. And that sort of stuff gives me misgivings about our species, our future, about how we behave in groups. What hope do we have when we publicly scapegoat someone like James Damore for a memo that he wrote where he literally spelled out his reasoning in very careful detail?

02:40:08
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know that I got, um... I remember walking into the lunchroom at work, finding a tweet of mine being broadcast, I think on MSNBC, in support of Damore.

02:40:21
Joe Walker: Well, what did you-- Do you remember what you said in the tweet?

02:40:23
Eric Weinstein: Well, yes. There was a particular employee of Google who was threatening... The context of this was lost. The, the, the employee was saying, "If HR doesn't fire this bastard," you know, in one form or another, um, you know, "they'll be hell to pay," or something like that. And I was responding to this idea that she felt, as an employee, that she had the right to have him fired by human resources for... I mean, I think the biggest sin of that memo was probably that he used a reserved term, which is neuroticism, which is-

02:41:07
Joe Walker: Yeah

02:41:07
Eric Weinstein: ... the psychometric, uh, as part of the Big Five personality inventory. And, you know-

02:41:13
Joe Walker: Which is unfortunate because it, it's a term of art in that context.

02:41:17
Eric Weinstein: Yes, but it's also, you know... I mean, I have my own problems with psychometrics.

02:41:24
Joe Walker: Okay.

02:41:24
Eric Weinstein: So y-

02:41:25
Joe Walker: Yeah

02:41:25
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, d- th-there's a question about, is there a structural oppression built in to the Big Five personality inventory? I'm not qualified-

02:41:34
Joe Walker: Right

02:41:34
Eric Weinstein: ... to take that on or not. You know, if you know that females are going to score higher on some psychometric, you know, is it in fact, uh, a hidden form of bigotry? I'm open to that idea. Whatever it is, but it needed to be signaled far more clearly. And it's clear also to me that Damore, um, is a spectrum-y individual, and I would say that-

02:42:00
Joe Walker: Mm

02:42:01
Eric Weinstein: ... you know, that, that came from my personal meeting with him. And he didn't understand why this was potentially problematic. Now, I, I defended him. I don't think he would necessarily always make the best choices, but who does make the best choices? The fact that we were willing to sacrifice him and that we have to preface, "I neither condemn nor condone," and all of the stuff that we have to do, the way I interpret what you called your cowardice is, is that you're trying to avoid a self-extinguishing event in which your adherence to some piece of personal honesty costs you your entire ability to communicate in future. So, all of us are hypocritical and cowardly because, uh, no one can survive the mob.

02:42:55
Joe Walker: Mm.

02:42:55
Eric Weinstein: But, you know, perhaps you now realize that you would've survived the mob had you held a stronger position and that a stronger position was warranted. I can't say. What I can say is, like, there is a, w- there are things about the left that I did not understand because my family's been on the left for 100 years, you know, easily. There is a strain that says, "Yep, good people have to get hurt if we're gonna make progress," or, "Yep, there are some edge cases in which somebody's going to lose a job and lose a career and lose their reputation, uh, in order to propel society forward." There's a blood-chillingly anti-empathic perspective that is commonly found in particularly the far left or the progressive left that I was just not aware of because it had never been part of my family's orientation. And now that I understand that that's not an error, that's a decision, progress is messy, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, which I think may have come originally as an analogy to human skulls, people who are up for the Great Leap Forward or farm collectivization or any of this kind of stuff and don't blink, this is part of the human condition. But you know what?

02:44:10
Joe Walker: Mm.

02:44:10
Eric Weinstein: Another part of the human condition is fuck that shit, and standing up, you know. And when people ask me about, like, defending my brother, um, I have to say that there was an exhilarating aspect of telling people to go fuck themselves for their blood-chillingly, uh, collectivist, uh, sadism. And you know, what I would say to your listeners is remember the joy of being on the right side of a battle against a mob. If you think you can take the mob, no guts, no glory, go for it.

02:44:49
Joe Walker: Hmm. That leads me very neatly into my final question, Eric. When we first spoke on the phone back in May 2019, I expressed to you some of these reservations about crossing the mob and the fact that you can be brutalized by the mob for taking contrarian stances even though you believe they're fundamentally right, and you gave me a piece of advice which I really appreciated. You said to me, "Well, how big are your balls? You need huge testicles [chuckles] if you wanna have an impact in this world, and if you wanna stand up for what you think is right." In this conversation, we've spoken about Peter Thiel and Nassim Taleb, your own personal journey, and the battles you've had with, for example, members of the physics community. Leave us with a, a final exhortation. What rewards await those who have big testicles? Or maybe to, to make it gender neutral, to those who have contrarian courage.

02:45:51
Eric Weinstein: No, you say huevos.

02:45:53
Joe Walker: [chuckles]

02:45:54
Eric Weinstein: The Spanish word for eggs, because men and women both have eggs, one literally, the other metaphorically.

02:46:01
Joe Walker: Oh, okay. I could've said huevos.

02:46:03
Eric Weinstein: We all have it, and you have to titrate up. I mean, first of all, find some smaller battles that you think you can win, uh, just to see if you can do it that, that won't be absolutely catastrophic. Learn how to manage your risk. You know, if you're not very diplomatic, I wouldn't walk out onto Twitter and, uh, just speak your mind because it's gonna be a very short ride even if what you're saying is largely true. And be sensitive and kind. It's not just about, um, you know, testicular, uh, fortitude. It's, it-- If you, if you, if you're looking to develop huevos, you have to find goodness in yourself, and you-- I, I think a few times, um, you know, I've tried to talk about the fact that people are misguided in their desires to progress the world. Um, so if you're going to do battle, you know, try to remember that the people you're battling with probably have a, a narrative in which they think they're doing the right thing. However, I think glory is kind of trading at a discount. We, we treat it as some archaic feature of the world, and I think about, like, all of the glorious human beings whose stories that I t- I, I tell the same ones over and over again because I think the world needs to hear them. So I'll, I'll leave you with, uh, two of my favorites from the Second World War.

02:47:25
Joe Walker: Yes.

02:47:25
Eric Weinstein: One is, uh, Johann Trollmann, uh, who was a Sinti, I guess a, a Roma or Gypsy of some kind, if you will. A great boxing legend, and the Germans were apparently, uh, very knowledgeable about boxing, and he made the mistake of doing very well in the ring and being devilishly handsome, uh, despite the fact that he was swarthy of, of color. And the, the Nazis gave him the loss, and the crowd was having none of it. They loved him. So this guy divorced his wife so that he wouldn't endanger her, covered himself in flour for the next bout, and the Nazis changed the rules about how he could fight. He was a very athletic fighter in the Muhammad Ali vein, apparently. And he shows up in the ring doused in flour and mocked the entire Nazi system after protecting his wife, took the loss, and got sent to the camps, was revered inside of the camps, um, for his talent and skill, but still killed by the Nazis. And what a guy, you know? And I, I wanna keep telling his story because he, he inspires me, you know. So even when you lose, this guy had no way out, couldn't find a way out. But even in a desperate situation, he did an unbelievable job for us, and he left us a tale that I think, you know, is worthy of naming a male child after him, uh, if you have enough of them. Another one, um, from the World War II... Well, I, I'll tell a non-World War II one, and I'll go back to World War II to finish it out. Uh, Frances Oldham, uh, was a woman who came out of the University of Chicago, I believe, who stood up in the US against thalidomide. She was in a regulatory position. She said, "I don't care how much pressure the pharmaceutical companies are gonna put on me. I don't see enough evidence that this is a safe drug," and prevented the flipper babies that were common, I guess, in Europe from being, uh, a problem much in the US. Just one person standing up, uh, making a huge difference and saying, "I refuse, uh, to see what the rest of you claim." And then the best for last, uh, Witold Pilecki, who was a, um, officer in Poland, who was not Jewish, who was convinced something terrible was happening, uh, at Auschwitz, and got himself, uh... I, I guess he dressed as a Jew, if I understand correctly, so that he would be taken into Auschwitz. Inside of Auschwitz, he organized resistance and took reconnaissance, um, of the situation, and then figured out how to smuggle himself out of Auschwitz. Like, levels of bravery that you can't even imagine a human could possess, just a confidence in themself. And I think it's really important that we tell these tales of these individuals who inspire us by doing the unthinkable, and we're never gonna do what those guys did, you know? But just to know that it's possible and just to know that there are people who wanna tell your story because you inspired them no, no end, you know, in your darkest moments, I think this is a great, um, way of passing the information that even when you're up against it and you have no way out, uh, you can still lead an incredibly inspiring life. We are all, we are all dying at different rates, but you can choose what to do during that process of dying that we call life. And, uh, do something that inspires the hell out of others and you'll get a multiplier effect. And even after you're gone, what it is that you contribute will, will live on. And if you- if that doesn't mean anything to you, then you're listening to the wrong podcast, because I think it's very important that even if we don't believe in, in a god, uh, and we don't believe in an afterlife, that, uh, the old adage that society functions when old men plant trees under whose shade they will never, they will never sit, I think holds true. And we just have to be comfortable with the fact that we're part of a very long chain, and we have to ensure that that chain continues, and that's the job of society. And if, if that doesn't appeal to you, I'm sorry that I wasted your time on this podcast.

02:51:59
Joe Walker: Eric Weinstein, I think this is the second longest podcast I've ever recorded, and I've enjoyed every moment of it. Thank you so much for your time, and we hope to see you in Australia soon. You'd be very, very welcome here.

02:52:12
Eric Weinstein: I can't wait for my next visit. My last visit just whetted my appetite. And, uh, do great things, guys.

02:52:18
Joe Walker: Thanks, Eric. Take care.

02:52:20
Eric Weinstein: All right. Be well.

02:52:22
Joe Walker: [outro music] Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. For show notes and links to everything we discussed, you can find those on my website, www.josephnoelwalker.com. That's my full name, J-O-S-E-P-H-N-O-E-L-W-A-L-K-E-R.com. And you can also find me on Twitter. My handle is @josephnwalker. Until next time, thank you for listening. Ciao. [outro music]